It was more than 16 months ago now that  the 57-year-old Dr. Henry Janssen was found shot to death in his red Chevy pickup truck … on Scenic Caves Road, in the idyllic Bruce Peninsula community of Jackson’s Cove. And Dr. Janssen’s friend and neighbour, retired corporate executive Allan Wayne Powney , was charged with his murder only two days later – on January 24, 2008. [CW EDITORS' UPDATE, JAN 17, 2011: we should have said here some such thing as "retired corporate technician" Wayne Powney, not "executive": see Robert Preston's comment at the end of this report. L. Frank Bunting's original article does seem to have covered this base more or less properly. Our subsequent editorial emendations introduced the "executive" slip. Our apologies. And our thanks to Mr. Preston for correcting our mistake.]

Mr. Powney subsequently spent more than three months in jail before being granted bail in May last year. (More exactly: “Murder suspect Allan Wayne Powney literally sprinted to freedom Monday [May 5, 2008] -  to a waiting car from a side door at the courthouse – after a Superior Court justice released him on strict terms into the care of six family members who posted $300,000 bail.”) Then a  hearing into the fate of Dr. Janssen’s alleged murderer, Wayne Powney, was held on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at the Ontario Court of Justice in Owen Sound.

At that point there was talk of setting a date for a preliminary hearing, to determine if enough evidence exists to go to trial. Now, at last, we know that this inquiry will start on Monday, June 8, 2009. And it is scheduled for 14 days, concluding July 9.

NOVEMBER 4, 2009 UPDATE: For better or worse, the plot here has thickened again.  On November 4, 2009, the results of the June-July inquiry have surfaced at last.  It seems it has been determined that there is enough evidence to go to trial. And the Owen Sound Sun Times has reported that: “The first-degree murder trial of Allan Wayne Powney, who is charged in the death of a Bruce Peninsula doctor, will likely begin next April or fall … Powney, the neighbour and friend of Dr. Henry Janssen, was not in court yesterday while his case was adjourned to the Dec. 4 Superior Court of Justice assignment court … The date of the start of the trial will depend in part on Powney’s lawyer’s schedule, Justice Robert Thompson said.” The wheels of justice, in this case in particular, continue to grind ever so slowly.

JANUARY 9, 2011 UPDATE: Wayne Powney has been out on bail since May 2008. A preliminary inquiry in 2009 found enough evidence to send him to trial. Now, finally: “A jury is to be picked [this coming Monday], January 10 [2011] and his murder trial is scheduled to commence the next day … Visiting Crown attorney Mike Murdoch said … in an interview [in Owen Sound] that the trial should take about six weeks … Justice Robert Thompson is presiding over the case. Details … can’t be published until the trial is over.”

JANUARY 13, 2011 UPDATE: The case has unexpectedly come to a very quick end. For further details see our “Powney suddenly confesses in Bruce Peninsula murder .. life in prison ‘with no chance of parole for 10 years’!”

* * * *

Meanwhile, as a service to those members of the ordinary public still trying to follow this both tragic and still rather puzzling real-life murder mystery, we have reproduced below our original article on the subject from January 31, 2008, prepared by our diligent research colleague, L. Frank Bunting (and including updates to September 15, 2008).

As further current background to this article we have reproduced immediately below two recent reports on the hearing that starts this Monday, June 8, 2009. The first is from Scott Dunn at the Owen Sound Sun Times – the major newspaper in the Bruce Peninsula region where Dr. Janssen`s murder took place. The second is from the Orangeville Citizen – in the Ontario region where Allan Wayne Powney lived before he moved to Jackson`s Cove for his retirement.  (The main thrust of the most recent press report is reproduced in the November 4, 2009 update above. )

Owen Sound Sun Times …

A hearing begins Monday to determine whether enough evidence exists to send Allan Wayne Powney to trial on a charge of murder in the death of a Bruce Peninsula doctor.

Powney is charged with first-degree murder in the death last year of his friend and Jackson’s Cove neighbour, Dr. Henry Janssen.

The Bruce Peninsula physician was found shot in his truck on Scenic Caves Road in Northern Bruce Peninsula on Jan. 22, 2008.

Police descended on Jackson’s Cove, a remote, idyllic spot on Georgian Bay, readily accessible in winter only by ATV and snowmobile.

Janssen’s body was found on a Tuesday night and Powney appeared at a bail hearing two days later, charged in his death. He was 63 years old when charged.

Powney, who uses the name Buddy, spent more than three months in jail in 2008 before being granted bail in May last year.

Today’s preliminary hearing in the Ontario Court of Justice is scheduled for 14 days, concluding July 9.

The defence will likely seek a ban on publication of details heard during the hearing. That ban would be effective until the end of any subsequent trial or until the accused is discharged by the court.

Powney also faces six counts of possessing unregistered firearms and two counts of improper storage of a non-restricted firearm and ammunition.

More than 200 people attended a public memorial service for Janssen.

People told stories about the doctor, describing him as a physically imposing, quick-thinking and plain-spoken man who enjoyed life and lived it on his terms.

Area doctors helped cover for Janssen’s absence. He was semiretired and carried a roster of 550 patients. He’d worked on the Bruce Peninsula for five years.

Orangeville Citizen …

Former Orangeville resident Wayne Powney, 64, is to appear at Owen Sound next Monday, June 8, for a preliminary hearing of a murder charge stemming from the slaying of a neighbour, Dr. Henry Janssen, 57, in January 2008.

Mr. Powney, husband of retired Mono Amaranth Public School teacher Elaine Powney, was granted bail by a Superior Court judge shortly after he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

The Powneys had moved from Orangeville to their present waterfront home near Lions Head when Mrs. Powney retired in 1999.

Dr. Janssen and his wife Lynn moved to the same street as the Powneys in about 2003.

He continued his medical practice at a clinic in Tobermory and had been on duty at the Lions Head hospital on the night of his death.

Reports at the time said Dr. Janssen had not returned home as scheduled on the fateful night.

When the hospital called his home asking that he return, Lynn went in search and found him slumped over the steering wheel of his pickup truck on the remote Scenic Caves Road.

Mr. Powney was a former employee of Nortel and a local sports enthusiast.

L. Frank Bunting’s original report, January 31, 2008: MURDER ON THE BRUCE PENINSULA .. something going on we don’t know about?

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 15. The Bruce Peninsula is Southern Ontario’s variation on the magical Upper Peninsula in the adjacent State of Michigan (made forever famous by Ernest Hemingway‘s immortal fishing story, “Big Two-Hearted River“). It is also where the Niagara Escarpment, which starts down at the legendary Falls between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, drifts off into the more exotic northerly waters of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.

Whatever else, it is an idyllic place. That’s what lured the 57-year-old Dr. Henry Janssen and the retired corporate executive Wayne Powney to estate homes along Jackson’s Cove, on Georgian Bay. Now something about the idyll has gone wrong. Mr. Powney has been charged with the murder of his friend Dr. Janssen, found shot to death in his “red Chevy pickup truck … on Scenic Caves Road,” just after 9 PM on January 22, 2008. The crime has shocked and perplexed the local community. “There’s got to be something going on,” one resident has explained, “that we don’t know about.”

Woodstock, Ontario boy makes good …

Part of the poignancy of this murder mystery turns around the character and background of the victim. The late Dr. Henry Janssen was born and raised in a family of nine children, in the small southwestern Ontario city of Woodstock in the 1950s.

Woodstock, Ontario is a two-to-three hour drive south of the Bruce Peninsula. And perhaps especially in the 1950s it could stake some claims as an idyllic small city of the North American Midwest in its own right – a centre of hard work, relieved by sports and mom and apple pie. In this milieu Henry Janssen had developed disciplined habits, and grown to a height of 6 feet 7 inches, by the time he attended the University of Western Ontario, not far west of Woodstock.

At UWO the tall, young Henry played tight end for the school’s Mustangs football club in the early 1970s. He was so good that in his graduating year he qualified as the third overall draft pick of the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. He was also a top student, however, and decided to become a doctor of medicine instead.

After medical school Henry Janssen spent some years as a family doctor in North Dakota. But he eventually became homesick. At first he re-established his practice in Ingersoll, just a ways down the road from Woodstock. Then he returned to Woodstock itself, where he remained for 15 years, with his wife Lynn, and his son David, and daughter Rebecca (and quite a contingent of Janssen relatives, scattered throughout the wider region).

The dream house on Jackson’s Cove

Both Dr. Henry Janssen and his wife Lynn liked outdoor life. It was on a camping trip in the Bruce Peninsula several years ago that they were struck by the unique attractions of spending their golden years in the place, now that their children were young adults. They purchased a large lot on “Georgian Drive, which curves around Jackson’s Cove, a small, idyllic inlet off Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay” (on that part of the larger Georgian Bay known as Hope Bay). And they arranged to have a dream house erected on the lot.

Intriguingly enough, the Owen Sound Sun Times has reported that the “Janssens’ home was featured recently in the winter edition of Our Homes magazine. An article by Jim Fox with accompanying photos shows a modern 2,700 square-foot bungalow filled with pine and oak furniture on a 44.5-acre parcel of land with 550 feet of waterfront. The article quotes Lynn Janssen describing the idyllic location’s privacy and access to an outdoor lifestyle including hiking and skiing. In winters, the couple have to snowmobile into and out of their property.”

When he moved to the Bruce Peninsula some five years ago, a nephew has told the press, “Dr. Janssen’s intent was to slow down.” He became a member of the Bruce Trail Club, and tried to spend more time enjoying the great outdoors, in all seasons.

Ye he also continued to practice as a dedicated and highly skilled family doctor, with an adroit bedside manner and valued sense of humour. An article in the Sault Star reports that “Janssen was among four physicians and a nurse practitioner on [the] staff of the Peninsula Family Health Team. Doctors on the team provide consultation service to patients in clinics in Lion’s Head and Tobermory and emergency coverage of the Lion’s Head hospital.”

Another newspaper article, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, explains that according to his nephew Brad Janssen, the doctor was in fact not exactly “slowing down” in his idyllic country retreat. “Henry was his own man. He had a passion for what he did. I can honestly say anybody I talk to that was a patient of his just raved about him.”

The same article goes on: “Ken Pritchard, a colleague of Dr. Janssen’s in Lion’s Head, released a statement earlier this week saying the health-care team was suffering from an overwhelming sense of sadness, shock and deep sorrow … He was a commanding presence towering over most of us and bringing with him a sense of humour that was infectious and much appreciated in the hectic world of hospital care and medical practice … To say that it will be difficult to move forward without him is an understatement.”

What was going on between the Janssens and the Powneys?

One reason many Northern Bruce Peninsula residents have trouble understanding Wayne Powney’s alleged murder of Dr. Henry Janssen is that the Janssens and the Powneys were both close neighbours on the Jackson’s Cove street called Georgian Drive, and apparently even friends.

According to press reports, the 63-year-old Mr. Powney “identified himself on an Orangeville high-school reunion website in 2000 as a retired Nortel employee and father of two.”

(Nortel here means the once near-great high-tech firm with global reach Nortel Networks [formerly Northern Telecom], headquartered in Brampton in the Greater Toronto Area, somewhat south and east of the exurban edge city of Orangeville – where Orangeville is about two hours drive south and east of the Bruce Peninsula.)

A Georgian Drive neighbour, Mr. Dixon, has further reported that “Powney and his wife have two grown children who don’t live with their parents now. Powney worked for Northern Telecom … on the technical side of the business … Dixon said he believed Powney retired at age 50, but he continued to do freelance work for Northern Telecom.”

Both Dr. Henry Janssen and his wife Lynn and Wayne Powney and his wife Elaine are “relatively new” to the Lion’s Head area of the Bruce Peninsula. (Lion’s Head, in case you have forgotten, is the hamlet where the local hospital is located, somewhat north of Jackson’s Cove.) “Mr. Powney, who sometimes refers to himself as Buddy,’ bought property on Georgian Drive in 1988, although his [2000 school reunion] Internet posting suggested he only began living there full-time when his wife, a former Orangeville schoolteacher, retired in 1999.”

The Janssens and the Powneys are in any case “country neighbours on Georgian Drive at Jackson’s Cove … The mailboxes of the two family names appear beside one another at the intersection of Hopeness Road and Jackson’s Cove Road.” The “Powneys live in the middle of the development, about one kilometre away, and the Janssens live another kilometre further west.”

According to Henry Janssen’s relative, Herman Janssen (who lives in the Meaford area, along Georgian Bay somewhat east of the Bruce), Henry and Wayne Powney “were friends,” and had “been out boating together … and had drinks together.” As far as Herman Janssen knows, Mr. Powney is a “decent guy.” Moreover, the local press goes on to report, the “wives of both Janssen and Powney are best friends. Together, they ski and walk their Labrador dogs.”

According to the Mr. Dixon who is another Georgian Drive neighbour, Elaine Powney had “slept at the Dixon home” on the evening of Thursday, January 24, just after her husband had been charged with murder. Mr. Dixon apparently accompanied Mrs. Powney to bail court the next day in Owen Sound (the largest urban centre in the region, just at the southern edge of the Bruce Peninsula) – where Wayne Powney appeared “emotional, shaking and weeping.”

Case adjourned until Friday, February 8

At this point the case was just put over to Wednesday, January 30. A week before, however, on the evening of Wednesday, January 23 – the “night after Dr. Henry Janssen was found shot to death” – another local friend of both the Janssens and the Powneys , Steve Farnan, had “called … Wayne Powney to find out what had happened.” As yet Powney had still not been charged by police. He mentioned to Farnan that “he had thought Lynn Janssen would be calling because she was expecting him to give her a ride on his snowmobile to get out of their secluded waterfront subdivision, which is accessible only by snowmobile or ATV this time of year.”

Steve Farnan has also told the local press that “Powney used to play bridge with Lynn Janssen and two other women … It was like a weekly thing or twice weekly or something like that … The group met at Powney’s house, Janssen’s house and at another location.” Mr. Farnan has said as well that “he thought Powney was a decent fellow. This is really shocking to me.’”

Even in his state of shock, Steve Farnan braved a snowstorm, which closed roads, schools, businesses and some government offices throughout the wider region, to attend Wayne Powney’s appearance in bail court on the morning of Wednesday, January 30. He “said he was hoping to see Lynn Janssen in court to offer her any help he could.”

As it finally happened, on January 30 the case was adjourned again to Friday, February 8. Powney “appeared in bail court by video link … because police couldn’t bring him to court due to the weather. He appeared on a large TV screen at the front of the small courtroom dressed in orange overalls.” He was no longer weeping, and “responded Yes, sir,’ in a clear, calm voice when Justice of the Peace David Stafford adjourned his case.”

On Wednesday, January 30 as well Ontario Provincial Police Constable Dave Meyer told the local press that police had “finished investigating the Jackson’s Cove neighbourhood where the Powney and Janssen families live … Now officers are interviewing acquaintances of the victim and Powney. They “still want to speak with anyone who drove along Scenic Caves Road between noon and 9 PM” on Tuesday, January 22.

Constable Meyer went on: “It’s all in preparation for court now. You know, checking backgrounds . . . the whys of everything.” This seems just what so many people in the Bruce Peninsula are at the moment so puzzled by too.

* * * *

SEPTEMBER 15 UPDATE: Yet another hearing into the fate of Dr. Janssen’s alleged murderer, Wayne Powney, was held on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at the Ontario Court of Justice in Owen Sound. Powney himself, who is still free on bail subject to certain conditions (see below), did not appear in court. Owen Sound lawyer Ian Boddy appeared on his behalf.

Progress in the case has for some time been waiting on test results from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. As reported by Scott Dunn in the Owen Sound Sun Times: “Assistant Crown attorney Michael Martin said test results from the Centre of Forensic Sciences won’t be ready by the end of November. But he said a date for a preliminary inquiry, to determine if enough evidence exists to go to trial, should still be set. It’s estimated the hearing will last three weeks.

“Martin also said a judge’s ruling is needed on the admissibility of certain documents’ to determine if they’re subject to solicitor-client privilege. That ruling need not be made before the preliminary hearing, he said.”

It is now expected that a date for this preliminary hearing will be set on Thursday, October 23, 2008. That will be almost exactly nine months from Dr. Janssen’s shooting death. In Ontario as elsewhere, it seems, the wheels of justice in such matters do grind slowly indeed

MAY 6 UPDATE: There has now been a major development in the fate of Dr. Janssen’s alleged murderer, Wayne Powney. Following are some relevant excerpts from a report by Scott Dunn in the Owen Sound Sun Times:

“Murder suspect Allan Wayne Powney literally sprinted to freedom Monday – to a waiting car from a side door at the courthouse – after a Superior Court justice released him on strict terms into the care of six family members who posted $300,000 bail …

“Powney was first driven by family to Owen Sound Jail, where one member held up a coat to try to block a Sun Times photographer’s view of him. Powney, wearing a short white beard and moustache like hockey commentator Don Cherry’s, remarked Can I hit him?’ referring to the photographer.

“Details of evidence heard during the 2 1/2-day bail hearing and reasons given by Justice B.J. Wein for releasing Powney cannot be reported until the conclusion of a preliminary inquiry or after a trial, if there is one.

“Lead defence lawyer Michael Midanik said after the hearing he was pleased Powney has been released from jail. He has been in custody since Jan. 24, when he was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Dr. Henry Janssen …

“Asked to help explain why Powney was granted bail when charged with murder, Midanik said: He’s got no criminal background and the presumption of innocence applies. We’re going to be vigorously defending the charges and he expects to be acquitted.’”

Some members of the Janssen family present when Justice Wein’s decision was announced were not pleased by the granting of bail to Wayne Powney. The conditions on or terms of Powney’s bail, however, are quite strict and circumscribed:

“Powney was ordered to live under house arrest with his cousins, Tom and Joan Kennedy in Heathcote, near Thornbury. He is not to be left alone, may not use a phone or access the Internet or any messaging devices and be anywhere outside the home without one of those posting his bail present. He may visit his other sureties if approved in advance.

“Two other couples are also responsible to ensure he follows the rules and have agreed to let him stay with them: Powney’s sister, Carole Hill and her husband Kenneth Rolland Hill of London, and Powney’s daughter, Jacqueline June Irwin and her husband John, of Orangeville. The latter’s guns must be removed from their home before Powney may visit.

“Powney was ordered not to go within five kilometres of the University of Western Ontario in London, where Rebecca Janssen, the doctor’s daughter, is studying medicine, or anywhere else she is likely to be in London. He must have no contact with the doctor’s widow, Lynn, or her son David either.”

Further details are available in Scott Dunn’s report in the Owen Sound Sun Times. The greatest continuing mystery at the moment, of course, involves the details “of evidence heard during the 2 1/2-day bail hearing and reasons given by Justice B.J. Wein for releasing Powney,” which “cannot be reported until the conclusion of a preliminary inquiry or after a trial, if there is one.”

MARCH 1 UPDATE: Manny Paiva of Bayshore Broadcasting in the area has reported that: “A funeral will be held this weekend for Doctor Henry Janssen – the popular doctor who was killed in the Lions Head area … The family is holding a funeral service at 1 o’clock this afternoon [Saturday, March 1, 2008] at Cobble Beach and it will be followed by a Celebration of Life …

“Thousands of people are expected to attend – including family and friends from the Woodstock area where Doctor Janssen lived before moving to Bruce County five years ago … Doctor Janssen – who was 57 – was found shot to death in his truck on Scenic Cave Road southeast of Lion’s Head in January …

“His neighbour and former friend – 63 year old Allan Wayne Powney of Northern Bruce Peninsula – has been charged with first degree murder … He [Wayne Powney] made a brief video court appearance in Owen Sound Thursday [February 28] and his case will go back to court on March 20th.”

FEBRUARY 9 UPDATE: Scott Dunn has reported in the Owen Sound Sun Times that “Toronto trial lawyer David Midanik will soon be defending Wayne Powney,” who “appeared again in bail court Friday [February 8] by video link from Owen Sound Jail. Local lawyer Ian Boddy adjourned the case to Feb. 28 and told Justice of the Peace David Stafford that Midanik would be defending Powney.”

Midanik “will be coming to Owen Sound to interview Powney before the next court appearance, Boddy said … Grey County Crown attorney David Hay said a synopsis of events, a timeline and background information has been handed over to Boddy, who brought Midanik on the case. More Crown disclosure will follow, he said …

“Elaine Powney, the suspect’s wife, attended the bail hearing and met with Boddy privately in the courthouse after her husband’s appearance was over. She declined to speak with a reporter … Midanik has handled high-profile cases, including the defence of a man in the 1994 Just Desserts cafe shooting in Toronto …

“Locally, he defended Travis Gaeler in the 2004 Owen Sound manslaughter case in which Gaeler was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison for strangling his wife. The next year Midanik helped get drug charges dropped against two men caught with $400,000 worth of marijuana in a case which saw the judge criticize police for an unlawful search.”

* * * *

Along with the web references embedded in the text above, the report here is based on the following regional and national press reports:

Jessica Leeder, “Neighbour charged in killing of rural Ontario doctor,” The Globe and Mail, January 25, 2008.

“Police say Bruce Peninsula doctor was murdered … Post-mortem confirms gunshot wound as cause of death,” The Sault Star, January 25, 2008.

Patrick Maloney, “Friend charged in doc’s slaying … The accused, Wayne Powney, had openly wept with Henry Janssen’s grieving relatives,” London Free Press, January 26, 2008.

Jim Algie, “Community in shock… ‘Everybody liked him’,” Owen Sound Sun Times, January 26, 2008.

Tracey Richardson, “Family reaches out,” Owen Sound Sun Times, January 26, 2008.

Scott Dunn, “Neighbour charged in doctor’s murder … Allan Wayne Powney has been charged with first-degree murder,” Owen Sound Sun Times, January 26, 2008.

Scott Dunn, “Suspect in doctor’s murder to appear for bail hearing … Lawyer expects case to be remanded for 10 days,” Owen Sound Sun Times, January 30, 2008.

Scott Dunn, “Suspect sounded ‘shooken up’ … Friend recounts conversation with Wayne Powney day after murder,” Owen Sound Sun Times, January 31, 2008.

[CW Editors' note, January 13, 2011: Our apologies. Some of these links are no longer active, and the references now refer only to the dates of the articles in their print edition forms.]

* * * *

The first photograph above is of the London, Ontario artist Christie Davis-Amyot, standing beside her landscape paintings of the Bruce Peninsula, including “Winter, Jackson’s Cove.”

Other photographs depict Bruce Peninsula shoreline scenes, the Lion’s Head hospital with flag at half mast to commemorate Dr. Henry Janssen’s sad death, and the Janssen home at Jackson’s Cove.

[Alas these notes also refer in most cases to links and illustrations that are no longer active.]

Introducing the Tingleys

The five male Tingleys who are now charged with various aspects of operating an organized crime ring that allegedly peddled drugs, weapons and firearms are Roger Tingley, 54 and his twin brother Rodney Tingley, 54, and then Rodney’s three sons, Michael Tingley, 32, Kevin Tingley, 30, and Christopher Tingley, 25.

Also charged are three women: Sharon Tingley, 49, Gail Tingley, 54, and Missy Tingley (also known as Melissa Patten), 32. Sharon and Gail Tingley are the wives of Roger and Rodney Tingley. Missy Tingley or Melissa Patten is the wife of Rodney’s son Michael.

It has been reported as well that, when the initial arrests were made in December 2008 a “ninth person was arrested … but released.” This ninth person was apparently a woman. So it would seem clear that the person involved was not “Steven Tingley, another of Rodney’s sons.”

Steven Tingley, however, has “created a Facebook page called Support for The Tingley Family’.” This page had as many as “174 members” just before Christmas 2008. On the page “Tingley writes that he’s looking for people to support his family, adding that they’ve been arrested for some stuff they didn’t even do.’ He goes on to write that they’re not an organized crime family and most of you guys know that they are just like anyone else … If any of you guys have met my mom and dad you know they are the most caring people.’”

Prelude: the fire, the family feud, and the start of the RCMP investigation in October 2007…

The RCMP investigation that led to the current charges against the Tingley family began in October 2007. But there was a kind of late September 2007 prelude here. It involved three fires in the Salisbury, New Brunswick area, which “destroyed David Hopper’s $300,000 garage, Byron Hopper’s large high-end’ cottage and a third house not owned by either man but originally built by the Hoppers years ago.”

The “brothers David and Byron Hopper” had already been “operating a successful contracting business when they won a $25.4-million Lotto 6-49 jackpot in December 2003, a near-record for Canadian lottery wins at the time … By all accounts … the brothers [had] been more than generous with their windfall, spreading it around not just to the rest of the family – and it’s a big one – but to many individuals and even businesses in need.”

At the same time, CanWest News Service also reported that: “A woman who identified herself on the phone yesterday as Byron Hopper’s wife … said the fires weren’t the first problem for the families. There’s been many, many incidents – many. This has been leading up to this’ … She said their high-end’ cottage was burnt to the ground,’ but refused to comment on anything else. This for the safety of our family. We have children and grandchildren.’ …

“The families are not under police protection, but the RCMP have added patrols in the area … Reached by phone, David Hopper confirmed that heavy equipment on land the brothers had subdivided had been vandalized with gravel put into the gas tanks. He refused further comment.”

Others in the Salisbury area thought they knew who was responsible for the Hopper brothers’ grief. And they made their suspicions known to Rod Allen of the Moncton Times & Transcript. The Tingley family, many in the community thought, was the guilty party.

Rod Allen’s newspaper article carried on: “Some of the Tingley youngsters are catching it at school and that’s not fair, says Roger Tingley, who lives with his wife on the Middlesex Road just a few miles south of the village …

“It looks like these arson cases were solved by the public before the fires were even put out,’ he says … My whole family, at least eight names have been mentioned over the past days, have all been found guilty and I just wish the public had all the facts to go on first … I personally do not condone these fires at all. I have no idea who might have done them and when they solve this crime I say let the cards fall where they may.’

“Tingley [Rod Allen continued] understands full well that he has to be careful what he says next. He draws no connection between fires and any other circumstances or occurrences anywhere in the Salisbury area, but says the whole town has been linking the fires to a feud between the Hoppers and the Tingleys … It’s just not true, he says …

“The fact is there’s a business dispute going on between the Hopper brothers and one member of the Tingley family … If there is a relationship between that dispute and the occurrences this week, that’s up to the police to figure out, he says, but in the meantime the public should understand that the Tingleys are for the most part law-abiding citizens …

“Roger Tingley admits he is no angel, and that he is not the only member of the clan to have had a brush or two with the law. I was in trouble for break-and-enter and so on, upsetting cars, impaired driving, stuff like that; but a lot of kids from other families around here had their troubles back then, not just the Tingleys.’ Tingley says he hasn’t been in any trouble for a long time, has quit drinking and just wants to get along with his neighbours.”

Operation Jekyll and the RCMP raid on the Tingley compound in December 2008 …

Whatever Roger Tingley’s neighbours might have thought about his comments in the Moncton Times & Transcript, the local Mounties (or RCMP) were especially sceptical. They began their investigation into the Tingley family’s activities in October 2007.

Their suspicions (like those of the neighbours) were heightened by the garish but quite professional-looking sign at the entrance to the “Tingley Compound” – which also bore the motto “What you see here … What you do here … What you hear here … STAYS HERE!”

The RCMP investigation was codenamed Operation Jekyll. According to the official news release at the end of things: “The case has proven to be a difficult one for police as witnesses have been leery about coming forward to provide evidence. As such, for the first time in New Brunswick, a 2002 amendment to a Section of the Criminal Code of Canada focusing on Organized Crime was utilized. If convicted, sentences will be served consecutively, meaning for each conviction the guilty party will have to serve each individual sentence. This can result in a very lengthy prison sentence depending on the number and scope of the charges.”

The RCMP news release noted as well that Roger, Rodney, Michael, Kevin, Chris, Sharon, Gail, and Missy Tingley “have been collectively charged with 57 offences. Among the charges are conspiracy to traffic in cocaine, OxyContin, marijuana, contraband tobacco, weapons and firearms, and being members of an organized crime group.”

The last paragraph added: “A number of arsons in the area were also part of the police investigation. Although no charges have yet been laid in those cases, further charges and arrests are pending.”

Having spent more than a year gathering evidence, the Mounties were finally ready for action. On December 11, 2008 the Moncton Times & Transcript reported that: “More than 100 RCMP members from across New Brunswick descended on eight homes simultaneously in the countryside around Salisbury before dawn yesterday, arresting five men and four women and dismantling what the force is calling a criminal organization .. At ground zero of the investigation, a Middlesex Road property described as The Tingley Compound’ by a professionally made sign, an impressive looking RCMP Mobile Command Centre is set up …

“The command centre belongs to H Division, the Nova Scotia RCMP, and was brought in from Halifax. Marked police cruisers dispersed throughout the region bore code numbers identifying their regular patrol areas as places like Oromocto and Miramichi … By mid-morning, the first Porta-Potties were being delivered, suggesting RCMP members were setting up for the long haul.”

The newspaper report concluded with: “Meanwhile, another home raided in Middlesex, one within sight of the Tingley compound, had a handmade sign in the door of the garage that read, Att – RCMP – Keep harassing me all nite long if you insist. If you do, don’t blame me if signs appear about your affair at Salisbury Ultramar and what goes on at Parkindale Camp?’ …

“If the sign implied a threat or spoke of something else entirely, there were no signs the RCMP looked intimidated yesterday as they moved freely throughout the raided properties … Said one police officer, as he looked at more than a dozen marked and unmarked police vehicles of every shape and size gathered at the Tingley compound, our gang is bigger than their gang.’”

As already noted, only three of the four women originally detained were finally charged. The RCMP press release on Operation Jekyll described the ultimate disposition of the resulting five men and three women: “Rodney Tingley, Michael Tingley, Kevin Tingley and Chris Tingley have been remanded into custody until a bail hearing scheduled for December 17 and 18, 2008 in Moncton Provincial Court. Roger Tingley is currently in hospital and will appear in court at a later date but has been charged. Sharon Tingley, Gail Tingley and Missy Tingley have been released on strict conditions. ”

Developments in late December 2008 and January 2009 … and what may or may not lie ahead?

On Friday, December 19, 2008 the Moncton Times & Transcript reported that bail hearings for the Tingley men in custody (including Roger, who was actually in hospital, as noted above) “were adjourned until … some time after Christmas.”

By the end of December the Tingley men had either been denied bail (in two cases) or temporarily waived their rights to bail hearings. On December 30 they all appeared in court and “chose trial by judge only.”

They “told the judge they wanted information on how police received authorization for their search warrants … The Crown prosecutor said some of that information had been passed along. But the lawyer acting on behalf of the Tingleys for the day said the information was on a hard drive and the Tingleys don’t have access to a computer in jail …

“The lawyer acting for the Tingleys also asked the judge to set a preliminary hearing date as soon as possible. But the judge decided to wait to set a date until the other three family members [i.e. the three women charged] appear in court on Jan. 12.” Meanwhile, CBC News reported, the “five Tingley men remain in custody.”

On January 12, 2009 CBC New Brunswick reported: “A Crown prosecutor has provided laptops to jailed members of the Tingley family so they can have access to the evidence that led to a massive December raid on their properties.”

On the same day all eight Tingleys – men and women – “appeared in court before Judge Jolene Richard. The women elected to be tried by judge alone in Court of Queen’s Bench, which is the same election the men made Dec. 30.” (The three women, it was noted in the January 13 Times & Transcript report as well, “were in court but are not in custody. They face far fewer charges and were released on conditions after their Dec. 10 arrest.”)

The January 13 Times & Transcript report went on: “Defence lawyer Scott Fowler represented all the accused in court yesterday and said they wanted to waive their right to a preliminary hearing and proceed to trial. A preliminary hearing was expected to take as long as four weeks, so waiving that hearing will likely result in an earlier trial date …

“Crown prosecutor Michel Bertrand told the judge an indictment will be filed with the Court of Queen’s Bench and a trial will be scheduled some time after that … While Fowler and his brother James Fowler have represented the Tingleys in court over the last month, neither will represent them at trial. The defence lawyer told the judge yesterday the accused have all applied for Legal Aid representation for their trial.”

A parallel January 13 report in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal indicated: “The trial date will be set in February.”

On January 25, 2009 a comment to a related CBC report on the web, from an apparently well-informed individual known as hatguy521, indicated: “So the next court date is on FEB 2 to see when the Trial starts i hope for their sakes they can get threw the disclosure since they are only allowed to use the computer like 2 hours a day witch everyone else get to walk around with theirs on paper i don’t think this is really fair.”

With a bit of help from the counterweights legal staff (I hope), I will be continuing to follow the adventures in court of the eight Tingley family members who have been charged – as best I can.

Whatever else, the story makes you wonder about law and order in our kind of society today. And the big questions remain: Are the Tingleys really “trash,” and should they “be locked up for a long time“? Or is Steven Tingley right, when he says “that they’re not an organized crime family and most of you guys know that they are just like anyone else … If any of you guys have met my mom and dad you know they are the most caring people’”?

One of the movie’s gripping messages seems to be that the long Iraq War, in a dusty burnt-out centre of ancient civilization, has hideously brutalized the US military. Yet even up in Canada, in what used to be called Toronto the Good, we have now had the release of a long-awaited government report on youth violence. It was commissioned after the death of Jordan Manners, who was shot last year at “C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, where a serious stabbing also occurred this week.” This was only “the latest in a series of recent school-related violent incidents in Toronto.” It is apparently not just the US military that has been brutalized in the early 21st century. And it isn’t just the Iraq War that lies at the bottom of disturbing new waves of domestic violence in both the United States and Canada.

The Pietrzak murders in Southern California …

One question the Pietrzak murders raise (and the movie In the Valley of Elah finally seems to answer) is how can US Marines kill each other, stateside as it were? Along with the four who have been charged with his murder, Sgt. Jan Pietrzak, 24, was a Marine himself. More exactly, he “was a helicopter airframe mechanic at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego” (also associated with Camp Pendleton – “the major West Coast base of the United States Marine Corps“).

Two of the four Marines charged with the murder of Sgt. Pietrzak and his wife – Lance Cpl. Emrys John, 18, of Maryland, and Lance Cpl. Tyrone Miller, 20, of North Carolina – actually worked for Pietrzak at the Miramar Air Station. (The other two Marines charged in the case are Pvt. Kevin Cox, 20, of Tennessee, and Lance Cpl. Kesaun Sykes, 21, of California. Sykes is the one known as “Psycho.”)

Pietrzak was born in Poland and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He joined the Marines in 2003 and served in Iraq from July 2005 to February 2006. He met Quiana Jenkins, who worked for a local Black Infant Care Center, three years ago at a party for Marines being deployed to Iraq. They were finally married just this past August 8, 2008. (According to Pietrzak’s mother: “They were in love … It didn’t matter to them that they had different skin colors.”)

In another bow to current “depression economics,” the Pietrzaks had purchased their five-bedroom home in the Winchester exurb of San Diego through a foreclosure. Jan Pietrzak “used his reenlistment bonus to replace the hardwood floor and carpet.” Both Jan and Quiana have been described by a family friend as “hardworking young people.”

Jan and Quiana had been married for a mere two months and one week, when they were “found gagged, tied and shot in the head … in the living room of their home,” on October 15, 2008. (Sheriff’s deputies had been called after Sgt.Pietrzak failed to show up for work at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.) The “home was ransacked and jewelry and other items were taken, investigators said. A fire was set, apparently in an effort to destroy evidence.”

The current official story appears to be that the four Marines who have now been charged were motivated in the first instance by a plot to steal from the Pietrzaks. They “acknowledged they had roles in the robbery, sexual assault [of Quiana] and murder … [Lance Cpl. Tyrone] Miller told a sheriff’s investigator that he forced his way into the home by pointing a shotgun at Pietrzak … Miller said he and the others went to Pietrzak’s home to rob him … [Miller] tied up the couple and discussed with [Lance Cpl. Emrys] John whether to kill them …

“The other two Marines acknowledged they went to the home to rob Pietrzak. All four said his wife was sexually assaulted, although each said it was the other three who committed the attack.” Apparently “shoes found at the barracks where [Pvt. Kevin] Cox and John lived matched prints left at the crime scene, and property believed stolen from the house was found at [Lance Cpl. Kesaun] Sykes’s home.” All four men have each been “charged with two counts of first-degree murder and special-circumstance allegations of committing multiple murders, committing the crime during a robbery, and rape by instrument.”

As various commentators have noted (including the mothers of both victims), conventional robbery seems like a very slender motivation for such appalling crimes, committed by four Marines against another Marine and his wife. In the current era of what Paul Krugman calls depression economics, envy of the Pietrzaks’ five-bedroom house, acquired through a foreclosure by the boss of two of the assailants, could be part of a more exact explanation.

Photos of the four Marines who have been charged, published on the net, could be said to show as well that they are all black. And the rape of Quiana could be read as suggesting some tribalist resentment of the Pietrzaks’ mixed-race marriage. Yet the photos that have been published equally suggest that all four assailants are fundamentally mixed-race themselves. (Even if the crudest stereotypes of North American popular culture still do tend to label any mixed-race person with any degree of visible “black” ancestry as black rather than white – and, in the United States at least, there is no polite shorthand or label for “mixed-race” at all.)

The still deeper explanation suggested by Paul Haggis’s 2007 movie In the Valley of Elah would appear to be that US military culture has been dramatically “dysfunctionalized” by the often problematic and agonizing struggles of the past several years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too many among the new warriors of the new US neo-imperialism and the hyper-aggressive doctrine of pre-emptive war have become radically disoriented psychologically, so to speak. And too often they have begun to take this disorientation out on each other, in an almost random way.

No doubt this reading of events carries the troubles of the present to some ultimately not altogether realistic extreme. But even the workmanlike Wikipedia plot summary for In the Valley of Elah draws attention to a striking metaphor. Early on in the movie: “Though hurrying to the army base, Hank takes the time to stop at the local school, where the United States flag has mistakenly been hung upside down. Explaining to the school custodian, who is from El Salvador, that the American standard hanging upside down is a signal of distress, according to the United States Flag Code, he helps the caretaker righten it before continuing on his way.”

And then, at the very end of things: “With the crime finally solved and the men from Mike’s squadron revealed as his killers, Hank returns home to find a flag his son had mailed from overseas, along with a picture of it flying over his squad in Iraq. His faith shattered, Hank takes the flag to the school and hoists it upside down. He duct tapes the ropes of the flag staff and instructs the school’s custodian to leave it that way permanently.”

Knives and handguns in Toronto the not-so-good-any-more

Even long before 9/11 and all that, there has also been a parallel broader revival of old social Darwinist doctrines of the survival of the fittest humans – and such related policy concepts as Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in economic development – over the past quarter century or so. And (as useful as at least the notion of creative destruction in the economy can sometimes be) this has, quite arguably, generated its own broader brutalizing tendencies, especially in already disoriented and unstable less-affluent sectors of North American society.

“The only trouble with rugged individualism,” the old leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, Tommy Douglas, used to say in an earlier era, “is that it creates so many ragged individuals.” Especially in an age of increasingly absurd and dysfunctional drug laws, perhaps, many younger ragged individuals in disoriented cultural pockets have much better access to much more technologically sophisticated and dangerous knives and handguns.

There can of course be little doubt that “Toronto the Good” – which descends from the title of an 1898 book by one C.S. Clark (which also bore the motto “Not necessarily Toronto alone but every city in America”) – has always had an air of smug provincial hyperbole.

Like every big city everywhere, no doubt, Toronto has always had an assortment of problems with crime. In the late 19th century the city’s expatriate British historian Goldwin Smith used to complain about the “boy problem” on Toronto streets – by which he seems to have meant something like what we now dignify as youth crime, and so forth.

Yet to just casual older observers who have lived in this city most of their lives, in the early 21st century it certainly does seem that too many city schools are not as safe as they used to be. The very notion that a student could actually be shot dead – or grievously stabbed – in any city school is certainly something I find quite outrageous myself. And in the past few years there have similarly been a few too many reports of accidental deaths from wayward gunfire, in too many ordinary public places I typically frequent from time to time myself.

A quarter of a century ago many people felt they could say with very little hesitation that, certainly as such things go in North America, Toronto was an unusually safe city. Like most other Canadian cities, it probably still is a comparatively safe place. But I certainly don’t feel I can say it is as safe a city as it used to be. And, like many others again, no doubt, I am nowadays much more hesitant about extolling Toronto, Canada as a safe city.

There is also at least some wisdom, I think, in the proposition that the Pietrzak murders in Southern California and knives and handguns in Toronto the not-so-good-any-more are not entirely un-related. In Canada we used to think that we were largely isolated from at least the most distressing urban pathologies in the big cities of the United States. But this nowadays seems an increasingly vain thought at best.

Similarly, the recent inspirational election of Barack Obama of course has nothing directly to do with Canada at all. But as more than one opinion poll has shown he is very popular in Canada. And when he talked about “change” and “yes we can,” today’s new problems of big-city (and rising small- rural-area) crime were one of the things Canadians like me at least were thinking need to be changed – regardless of what some say about what is possible in what will no doubt remain largely ruggedly individualist societies.

Perhaps here as in other contexts, the larger world is just bound to be disappointed by Obamamania in practice. Just too much is being expected, and on and on and on, etc, etc. It is part of the audacity of hope, however, to keep on hoping. Something certainly does need to be done about crime in the streets (and especially in the schools) nowadays. And the neo-con formulae of the likes of Stephen Harper in Canada do seem far too much tied into the broader pathological trends that are at the bottom of so many of our current problems in the first place.

“Marines are supposed to be brothers,” Jan Pietrzak’s mother has complained to her local press: “What kind of brothers are these?” She is right, of course. And, if you ask me, she is also pointing pretty clearly to one of the biggest changes that need to be made. (Or, are we our brothers’ keepers? Yes we can, indeed.)

PS: (1) The four marines charged in the Pietrzak murders are currently “being held in jail and [are] due in court on Thursday, November 20 [2008]. Prosecutors said they had not decided whether to seek the death penalty” (which is apparently possible in this case in California: it would not be in Canada of course, for better or worse).

(2) The long-awaited Ontario government report “by retired Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry and former Liberal MPP Alvin Curling … ordered in the wake of the May 2007 shooting death of student Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute” was finally released on November 14, 2008. For a brief account see the Toronto Star article, “McGuinty eyes race stats,” Saturday, November 15.

The Mounties “are saying they may never be able to determine if the crash that killed Anguish was intentional or not.” (I.e. did he finally commit suicide?) But there are good reasons to believe that he did strangle his wife, earlier that same day. He had a violent criminal record stretching back to 1980. And in 1994 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the “manslaughter” of a 69-year-old farmer near Hamilton, Ontario.

Why did he only get 10 years back then? Why did he only actually serve six of these 10 years? Why did Darcy Elder, who must have known something of his background, agree to marry him anyway in 2001? There may never be good answers to these questions. But they still linger in your mind.

Growing up absurd in Ontario …

Ricky Anguish grew up in Dunnville, Ontario, just north of where the Grand River meets the north shore of Lake Erie. He was apparently “abused as a child,” and his official “criminal record began in 1980,” in his mid teens.

According to his sister Sandra, who still lives in the nearby city of Hamilton: “He wasn’t the monster [the media] is making him out to be … He was in trouble … but he wasn’t always like that … I don’t want to make any comment about it other than he wasn’t totally 100 per cent a monster. He wasn’t like that. He was a very passionate person and he cared a lot for people … but things got in the way.”

One of these things, it is said, was drugs. They allegedly got in the way in his first big crime – the 1994 murder of the 69-year-old Hamilton area farmer Berkley Black (or as some sources say, Blake). According to a brother, Berkley had passed up “a chance to study in the US” when he somewhat reluctantly first “took over the family farm” many years before. He “milked the cows for years and hated it,” but was “too nice of a person” to complain.

Berkley was so nice that he sometimes gave work to Ricky Anguish, who still “looked like a dumb, innocent kid” at that time, even though he was in his early 30s. As Berkley’s brother explains the story, “Anguish was in and out of jail … but he’d always come out with the same problems. At some point, the drugs took hold and he needed the money to support his habit.” Anguish and a co-conspirator in the Berkley killing “had planned to rob a bank but got spooked when they saw police. Instead, they went to Berkley’s farm.”

So in the middle of November 1994 Ricky Anguish and his co-conspirator showed up at Berkley’s farm gate in broad daylight. As his brother tells it, Berkley “was reading the paper when he saw someone stop at the gate … Berkley was on his way back to his house, presumably to call police, when he was shot” with a sawed-off shotgun. Anguish “took the back of his head off and then … went through his pockets.”

According to another similar enough story, drawing on court records, the 69-year-old Berkley “was working on his truck when Anguish and a friend approached him.” When it became clear that Anguish intended to rob him, Berkley said “he was going to call police and turned toward the house.” Then Anguish levelled a sawed-off shotgun” at Berkley’s head “and squeezed the trigger.”

Settling for “manslaughter” …

Right after the shooting and robbery Ricky Anguish fled to Alberta. In fact even before the tragic Ontario events in November he had already “moved to Calgary in 1994 to begin a new life, but went on a crime and drug spree after a girlfriend broke off a relationship.” At that point he “travelled back and forth between Alberta and Ontario and weeks before the Black shooting, broke into his ex-girlfriend’s home [in Calgary] and caused $25,000 in damage … Two weeks after the killing, he entered her home again and held her at gunpoint for two hours before she convinced him to surrender to police.”

When Ricky Anguish surrendered in Calgary “he gave a statement to police without his lawyer present.” On the basis of this statement, it seems, he was then charged in Ontario with the first-degree murder of Berkley Black (or Blake). However, a “judge later ruled the statement inadmissable,” presumably because no lawyer had been present.

The upshot was that “Anguish should have been sentenced to life, as he would have for the first-degree murder charge he first faced.” But the inadmissability of his own statement to the Calgary police “affected the Crown’s chances of proving its case beyond that Anguish had been at the scene of the crime and was later found in possession of property belonging to Berkley Blake [or Black].” The Crown “could connect him with the theft, but wasn’t sure if it could go further.”

The upshot here was that Ricky Anguish finally pleaded guilty to the much less burdensome charge of manslaughter. And for this he ultimately received a sentence of 10 years – which is apparently “a long sentence for manslaughter.”

As it happened, moreover, Anguish proved a rather well-behaved prisoner. He was granted parole after serving only six years of his 10-year sentence.

He had already told the judge at his manslaughter trial: “we all make mistakes … I know deep down that I can be a good person and I’m asking you to give me that chance.” His subsequent parole officer similarly “enjoyed dealing with Anguish, who had a difficult upbringing,” and most of whose “support come from his sister …. He was a pleasant, decent enough client to deal with.” (And the ultimate end of the Ricky Anguish story in 2008, at the two-storey blue suburban home in the Bridlewood community and on the Trans Canada Highway, his parole officer also feels, was “a real shame.”)

Moving on to Alberta … things are good there in the fall …

Ricky Anguish “was on parole and living in a halfway house” in Calgary when he met Darcy Rae Elder, in the year 2000. She was “the oldest of four sisters and one brother.” Her “family had concerns about the parolee’s past.”

But, as one of her sisters has explained: “She would tell us he had a very kind demeanour. She admired the fact he was getting his life together … She was also the type of person who had the boyfriend who always needed help – needed to be fixed in some way … She was trying to fix him.”

Darcy Rae told her sister that Ricky Anguish was on parole, but “she never went into the details about his violent past … I’m not even sure she knew herself.” (Which seems a bit odd: how could she not know that his jail sentence was for “manslaughter,” and so forth?)

In any event, Anguish was now working “as a welder and as a trucker. The couple enjoyed camping and each bought Harley-Davidson motorcycles shortly after they started dating in 2000. They married a year later,” in 2001.

It may also say something about just why Darcy Rae Elder finally married Ricky Anguish that in 2002 she “travelled to Mexico to do roofing as a volunteer with World Vision Canada.” She had earlier “volunteered for more than 20 years with the Red Cross and had worked to raise awareness about multiple sclerosis.”

Anguish already had two children from an earlier relationship – back in Ontario, it seems. A son came to live with him and his new wife in Calgary. The son was 15 at the time. Darcy Rae “never had children, but loved her stepson as if he were her own.” As her sister has explained: “She was a nurturing stepmother. She liked to talk with him and keep him on the right path.” In her own wider family circle as well, she was the “favourite auntie who always had candy and gum in her purse and was always the one that would do fun stuff.”

More recently, Darcy Rae Elder herself was working as office manager at a railing company owned by a brother-in-law. Lately, she “had just taken a position as executive assistant working with charities the company supports. But despite the exciting new life ahead, family noticed changes in Elder. Over the past year, she stopped socializing with people at work,’ her brother-in-law has said: Everything in her life kind of dropped away in the last two to three years.’”

Elder’s relatives apparently believe an increasingly “grim financial situation,” at least partly linked to Ricky Anguish’s “suspected drug addiction,” had something to do with the dropping away in her life. At the time of his and his wife’s death last week “Anguish was awaiting trial over accusations of stealing a semi truck and a credit card in Okotoks, Alta. last fall.” In the not too distant past: “Officers were also once called to the couple’s Bridlewood home to quell a domestic dispute.”

Oddly enough, this past January 31 Ricky Anguish was actually interviewed by the Calgary Herald. At the time he “was assisting in the cleanup of a five-truck pileup that killed three people on the Trans-Canada Highway near Lake Louise.” He told the Herald that “he drove rigs for six years, but got out of the business because he believed it was dangerous … drivers are pushed to their limits to make deadlines and financially penalized for missing them. He added there was a trend toward bringing in foreign workers who often aren’t aware of winter driving conditions.”

“It’s Ricky. You lose. I win.”

Most recently, “relatives believe financial pressure in the past two-and-a-half weeks was the catalyst” in the ultimate deaths of both Darcy Rae Elder and Ricky Anguish, on the afternoon of April 24. “Elder’s sister says at one point the couple got into an argument over mortgage payments and the woman actually left the house … Elder’s family says it believes she was murdered because she was going to leave him.’”

According to her brother-in-law: “We worked to get her out of this situation,” even calling domestic violence agencies for help – “Every single one in the book.” But Darcy Rae’s husband was “very controlling.” He told his wife: “You can’t leave me, you can’t see these friends.”

On the evening of Wednesday, April 23 Darcy Rae and Ricky apparently met for dinner. Then on the morning of Thursday, April 24 Darcy arrived for work at her brother-in-law’s railing company at 7:30 AM. She left at 9:30 AM to meet with creditors downtown. A friend reported seeing Darcy Rae and Ricky having coffee together around 10:30 AM.

By lunchtime Darcy Rae had still not returned to the office. Her brother-in-law became concerned and started calling her on her cellphone. “Anguish answered once and said Elder was in the washroom and would be at work soon.” Then around 2:30 PM the brother-in-law’s cellphone rang. It was Ricky Anguish with a very short but chilling message. He just said “it’s Rick. You lose, I win.”

At the time Ricky was driving his grey Pontiac G6 on the Trans Canada Highway just east of Calgary. Very soon after he phoned in his last chilling message he would, deliberately or otherwise, slip over to the wrong lane, crash into an oncoming semi-trailer, and die almost instantly. (The semi-trailer driver was taken to the nearby Strathmore hospital, treated for minor injuries, and released.)

Meanwhile, by 4 PM Darcy Rae Elder’s brother-in-law had walked into the Calgary District 8 police office “to report his fears for her safety … Anguish’s grown son, in his early 20s, arrived at the family’s Bridlewood home shortly after police made the grim discovery of his stepmother’s body at 6 PM … Grief-stricken and weeping, the young man tried ducking under the crime scene tape, but was led away.”

It seems clear enough that it was Ricky Anguish and no one else who strangled his wife on Thursday, April 24, 2008. But “homicide investigators still must eliminate any other persons of interest,” according to Staff Sgt. Kevin Forsen of the Calgary police homicide unit: “We want to make sure we eliminate everybody that had potential to be a person of interest or suspect. We don’t want to make a mistake of stopping the investigation and letting somebody get away with murder.”

It would also fit with his sister’s, his murdered wife’s, and his parole officer’s theory that Ricky Anguish was at bottom a good person with a troubled childhood who wanted to do better, to think that a few hours after he strangled his wife, he deliberately drove his car into the path of the oncoming semi trailer and killed himself.

But the Mounties who look after such things in Alberta (and in every other province of Canada, except Ontario and Quebec) “are saying they may never be able to determine if the crash that killed Anguish was intentional or not … Sgt. Patrick Webb said Anguish did not leave a suicide note and he had not been driving in the oncoming traffic lane for any length of time before the crash … “The witnesses said it was more like a loss of control, a swerve … It’s not definite yet and it may never be.”

SOURCES

Gwendolyn Richards and Stephane Massinon, “Man suspected of killing wife went ‘from bad to worse’,” Calgary Herald, Monday, April 28, 2008.

Michelle Butterfield, Stephane Massinon, and Sherri Zickefoose,”Husband’s chilling message: ‘you lose, I win’ … Wife sought help before slaying,” Calgary Herald, Sunday, April 27, 2008.

Michelle Butterfield, Stephane Massinon, and Sherri Zickefoose, “Alleged murder-suicide a chilling end to an anguished past,” Windsor Star, Sunday, April 27, 2008.

Pete Curtis, “Bizarre Details Surface Over Possible Murder/Suicide,” 660 News, Sunday, April 27, 2008.

Nadia Moharib, “Victim’s brother finds closure,” Calgary Sun, Sunday, April 27, 2008.

Nadia Moharib, “Murder-suicide suspected,” Edmonton Sun, Saturday, April 26, 2008.

Dawn Walton, “Man dies in head-on crash on same day his wife slain,” Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 26,2008.

Sherri Zickefoose and Michelle Butterfield, “Family feared for victim … Husband was convicted killer,” Calgary Herald, Saturday, April 26, 2008.

CBC News, “Calgary woman found strangled; husband dies same day,” Sympatico MSN News, Friday, April 25, 2008.

Sherri Zickefoose, “Slaying victim identified, husband dead,” Calgary Herald, Friday, April 25, 2008.

On Saturday, November 3 Hong Chao (Raymond) Huang was gunned down outside his mansion in Vancouver’s upscale Shaughnessy neighbourhood. Just three days before, on Halloween, Hiep Quang Do, had been killed at a restaurant on Victoria Drive. Then early on the morning of Tuesday, November 6, Ali Abhari and Ronal Shakeel Raj, out driving in a Silver Mercedes, were cut off by two SUVs on Granville Street at 70th Avenue and shot to death. A neighbour of Raymond Huang’s explained to the Vancouver Sun: “You don’t know what’s going on in a lot of these big houses.” But Mr. Huang was known in some quarters as a “leader in the … Big Circle Boys gang … connected to the crime syndicate’s operations in Toronto … as well as in Alberta and Vancouver.” Hiep Quang Do is said to have been “a player in the Vietnamese underworld, linked to the Big Circle Boys.” Mr. Abhari and Mr. Raj “were …. believed to have links to an emerging gang called the United Nations.” This is all just the tip of an iceberg, it seems. And it raises a lot of questions, in Vancouver and no doubt other parts of Canada too.

A Gang War in the Lower Mainland?

According to a November 7 editorial in the Vancouver Province: “Whatever the police choose to call it, we have a gang war in the Lower Mainland. The latest murders on Granville Street are reported to be the 18th and 19th gang-related killings this year in Metro Vancouver.”

According to the Vancouver Sun on Wednesday, November 7: “We’re obviously extremely concerned about this escalation of violence and potential for innocent victims to be hurt and killed,’ Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug LePard told reporters Tuesday. I would not say it’s necessarily truly a gang war,’ he explained. There clearly is a conflict between two or more gangs right now…. It’s not a classic dispute between one gang trying to take over the territory of another gang.’”

The Sun has also published a map showing the 18 places that have so far been sites for “Lower Mainland targeted shootings 2007.” Some will of course say that so long as it is just criminal gang members killing other criminal gang members, the law-abiding general public need not worry unduly. Yet as the Province‘s November 7 editorial has noted, in 2007 in Vancouver: “Innocent civilians have been among the victims – notably two men executed in cold blood for being in the wrong place at the wrong time’ in Surrey two weeks ago.”

Similarly (perhaps), in the most recent case of Mr. Abhari and Mr. Raj: “Police sources say Abhari, the passenger and a mid-level drug dealer, was probably the target. Both men are believed to have been in a downtown club and on their way home … A friend of Raj’s told the Vancouver Sun that the 31-year-old native of Fiji was not involved in gang activity. He was a good friend to everyone and always wanted those around him to have a good time,’ said James Milacic … As for what the media says about it being a targeted incident, maybe for the other person, I doubt it was for Shakeel,’ Milacic said. Shakeel was a very kind and caring person. … The police are making him out to be a gang member, and I assure you, he is not ‘in’ a gang’ … Raj co-owned a Port Moody house assessed at $802,000, according to property records and leased a Cadillac Escalade, in addition to the Silver Mercedes in which he was killed.”

Whatever else, it is impossible not to be somewhat concerned about what looks quite a lot like some kind of quite serious criminal gang activity in Vancouver these days, even if you live in other parts of Canada, far away.

According to a November 7 report in the Vancouver Province: “At least four gang battles are raging in the Lower Mainland, a police expert said in the wake of a double killing early Tuesday morning … This is not one gang war. There are four gang wars,’ said the police officer, a Lower Mainland gang specialist, adding that a fifth war is also brewing … There are different battles raging for street-level drug profits,’ said the police source … Meanwhile, a high-ranking Vancouver officer yesterday called on the province to revisit the funding devoted to stopping gangs … We are overwhelmed with the number of people out there that are involved in drug trafficking and are involved in gun violence,’ said Deputy Chief Bob Rich.”

As of Thursday, November 8, the latest news is that: “Almost two dozen Metro Vancouver police chiefs and commanding officers turned up in force Wednesday to announce they will join Vancouver police to launch a regional attack against gang violence.”

The report carried on: “We have to stop the killing and safeguard the public,’ Vancouver police Chief Jim Chu said Wednesday in announcing the latest strategy aimed at quelling a recent spike of gang violence that has claimed four lives on Vancouver streets within a week and 19 so far this year across the region … Starting next week, the new Violence Suppression Team, whose officers will wear the title emblazoned on their jackets, will start aggressively getting in the faces’ of known gangsters at night clubs, their homes, their cars and their known hangouts region-wide.”

What does it all tell us about life in our big city regions today?

Political cynics will not be surprised that in a concurrent speech he just happened to be making to the Vancouver Board of Trade, Canada’s minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper “said the federal government’s core priorities … include tackling the growing problem of gun, gang and drug crime … The recent murders in Surrey and Shaughnessy only underscore why all of the national parties campaigned in favour of tougher laws against violent crime and why the public is so fed up with the soft-on-crime approach,’ he said.”

Then the prime minister went on to link gang wars in the Lower Mainland on the Pacific coast up with his narrower political objectives, way back east in Ottawa: “But in the first session of this minority Parliament,” he told the Vancouver Board of Trade, “the opposition parties held up five critical pieces of anti-crime legislation. This is unacceptable. That is why we have now tabled the Comprehensive Tackling Violent Crime Act and made it a measure of confidence.”

People closer to the ground where the “growing problem of gun, gang and drug crime” actually takes place might be excused for wanting to tear their hair out in quiet rage, when they hear this kind of sanctimonious political claptrap. Thus the local press has also been reporting that: “More policing is not the answer to the gang wars apparently being waged on Lower Mainland streets, according to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan.”

The mayor went on: “Sullivan said .. that, while he has faith that the Vancouver Police Department will address the problem, enforcement is not the answer.’ As the Vancouver Police Department was announcing a new gang task force, Sullivan – who heads the police board – said the city instead needs more money from Ottawa.” The federal government is “cutting taxes – and, at the city level, we have to deal with the guns and gangs and drugs. We are very much pressured by our budgets,’ Sullivan said.”

Back not quite so far east as Ottawa, in the Greater Toronto Area city of Mississauga, moves are afoot which seem to point to a similar, if not exactly the same, broad local problem. There the local council, led by the redoubtable 80-something-year-old Mayor Hazel McCallion, has just added “an unprecedented 5 per cent surcharge to property taxes next year as the city tries to tackle … a fiscal crisis” in Canada’s urban centres, that federal finance minister Jim Flaherty has “ignored … in favour of cuts in the GST and income tax.”

You might think that this is just more self-serving political claptrap in its own right. But think about it all for just a minute longer. It is interesting to learn lurid details about such things as the Big Circle Boys, from the Mounties and other sources. Born back in the days of the Red Guards in China, they are now “arguably the largest, most expansive and successful triad” extant. Their current organization is “international in scope” and since ”first appearing in the United States in the early 1990s, it has set up cells in New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver.” The organization is now said to be “responsible for importing much of the Southeast Asian heroin entering Canada – much of which is then smuggled into the United States – and is the source for many of the counterfeit credit cards used in North America.”

The main trouble is that these and many other similar increasingly wealthy thugs and mobsters, from a wide variety of backgrounds, have come to think that they can treat the streets and public spaces of our cities as their personal firing ranges – regardless of how many innocent bystanders get hurt, and so forth, on and on. And they are increasingly able to get away with this, because, in many different ways, the practical presence of what Canada’s Constitution Act 1867 calls “Peace, Order, and good Government” has grown increasingly weaker on our city streets – under increasing pressure from a mindless and pernicious political philosophy, which all too foolishly urges that the government which governs least is governing best.

The most appalling irony is that political leaders like Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty, who, as matter of highly misguided ideological (and they say even constitutional) principle, are systematically draining much-needed public funds away from urban local governments, are also claiming that they in fact have the right policies to address the “the growing problem of gun, gang and drug crime.” It is hardly any wonder that the sovereign people who live in Canada’s biggest city regions – and who have a much better practical grasp of what the current crime and gang warfare issue in these places is all about – will not vote for such political leaders.

Meanwhile, someone has to figure out how to get some serious hands on all the big money that Ottawa has these days, and put it to some solid use in the war against gang war, etc, etc, etc. Like “next week’s meeting of big-city mayors” from across the country in Mr. Flaherty’s home base of Oshawa, Ontario – and Mayor Hazel McCallion’s plans for a “national campaign – dubbed Cities NOW! – to pressure Ottawa to use its huge surplus to help urban centres.”

Tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, from the narrow-minded and all too mean-spirited (to say nothing of increasingly obsolete) minority neo-con politicians in Ottawa, Ontario are just going to make the stalwart (if no doubt altogether crazy) criminals who run the Big Circle Boys, to say nothing of “an emerging gang called the United Nations,” laugh, and laugh, and laugh. The poorer and weaker our free and democratic governments are, the happier our criminals will be. Only people who live in very vast rural and rurban mansions, far from all madding urban crowds, can fail to see the plain truth of such simple propositions.

All this has come rushing back to me as I’ve read about the sad murder of the striking 33-year-old homeless lady Bly Markis, in “an underground stairwell at Yonge and Bloor streets,” on the evening of Saturday, April 28, 2007. This big city homicide also hit the news just when Canada’s Conservative minority government was “set … to focus on crime this week in Parliament.” But in the end America Junior’s Afghanistan variation on the great Iraq war debate in the USA seminally blurred Prime Minister Harper’s crime agenda. Even so, the case of Bly Markis in Toronto may still have a few things to tell us about the state of law and order in Canada today.

An easy crime to solve … thanks to surveillance video?

The case of Bly Markis is not exactly a great murder mystery. The Toronto press reported early on that “police say it’s only a matter of time until they figure out the name of the man wanted in connection with her murder thanks to surveillance video from both the Xerox building at 33 Bloor St. E., and the Yonge-Bloor TTC subway station.”

Ms. Markis and her alleged killer were “spotted by cameras entering the south side of the [Xerox] building, off Hayden St., around 10:30 p.m. Saturday [April 28]. They walked up a flight of stairs, through the Xerox building, and down an escalator that leads to the Yonge-Bloor subway station.” They then “disappeared from view when they walked down some stairs to an emergency exit in the basement, which is where Markis’ body was later found.”

The “wanted man” was “picked up by cameras again about 20 minutes later,” walking “out the emergency exit back onto Hayden St.” He was “carrying … a bag investigators believe belonged to the dead woman.” The video showed him walking “back inside the Xerox building, through the same door he and Markis entered earlier, then exiting on the north side onto Bloor St.” He “was seen by TTC cameras soon after that,” entering “the Yonge-Bloor subway.” And he was “also seen talking on a cellphone and investigators say they may be able to track that call.”

From here things moved very quickly. Early on Tuesday, May 1, 2007 “a man turned himself in to police in the company of his lawyer.” And one “Martin Horacio De Narvaez, 21″ was “charged with first-degree murder.” More exactly: “the accused surrendered to police … after a family member saw surveillance images of the suspect on the news on Monday [April 30].” (Or, still more exactly from another source: “A relative of a man allegedly caught on security camera near where Bly Markis was found murdered recognized the face and helped convince the suspect to turn himself in … the relative first saw the picture on the internet, then later on television.”) And “Martin Horacio Denarvaez, an unemployed Greater Toronto Area resident,” appeared in court Tuesday afternoon, “charged with strangling 33-year-old Bly Markis.”

According to current police thinking, “the victim and her killer had only met a short time before the slaying occurred overnight Saturday … There was not a lot of conversation prior to the murder. They met a short distance away from where she was discovered and the incident occurred very quickly,’” homicide detective Chris Buck told a press conference. As further reported by the media: “Markis’ body was found in a basement stairwell in the Xerox Centre building on Bloor Street near Yonge early Sunday morning … Investigators believe the two may have entered the building to do drugs and have sex.”

Detective Buck also “praised the surveillance cameras for helping in the investigation.” Ironically enough, “Toronto police, meanwhile, switched on about a dozen surveillance cameras around the city on Monday [April 30] as part of a six-month pilot program,” funded by the public tax base.

The “majority of the devices are watching over the entertainment district, while several cameras are in Scarborough’s Malvern community and the Jane and Finch area.” (All places some distance away from Yonge and Bloor, those familiar with Toronto might note, though some parts of that area are apparently already well served by the private sector and the TTC subway.)

It has been reported as well that in the new public-sector pilot program “closed-circuit cameras are recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but police say they won’t be watching the live feeds, only reviewing footage when an incident occurs.”

Who was Bly Markis?

What gives the Bly Markis case its unique poignancy is the late Ms. Markis herself. And that’s where the strikingly beautiful and even well-dressed young woman I saw near Yonge and Bloor years ago, squatting on the sidewalk and begging for change, comes rushing back to me.

Back then my friends and I had approached the lady, and asked if she was all right (as we also inevitably gave her some change). She was embarrassed, and said she didn’t know how she had landed in the mess she was in. But that’s where she was, and she said she was fine. Up close, her face had something of the grimy look that people who live on the street acquire. But she was still nicely made up, and wearing smart and even expensive clothes. Even as her face told of anguish and sorrow, it seemed radiant and almost cheerful too.

Bly Markis in the spring of 2007, it turns out, was some kind of cultural descendant of this lady on the streets from years ago. (Or so it is bound to strike me.) All the early press reports told us was that Ms. Markis “did not work in the Xerox building or any other nearby office towers,” and that her “parents live in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] and Markis was their only child.” The photograph of her that police distributed – and that quickly appeared in the press and online – did not suggest anything like a 33-year-old homeless lady. But then further media reports made clear that she “had fallen on tough times in recent years and become a street person.”

Bly Markis, local journalists soon discovered, was well known among street life support people in midtown Toronto. “Friends called her California,” because at “one time the tall, sunny-looking blond worked there as massage therapist in Ventura County after growing up in North York.” Ms. Markis fell on hard times when she came back but she was trying hard to get her life together.” Along with her GTA parents, she also had “relatives in California but … she had messed up enough times with her family’ to burn bridges.”

More than a few people apparently admired Ms. Markis, even in her troubled state. Some of her friends gathered on Monday, April 30 “at the Sanctuary, a centre” near Yonge and Bloor “that assists the homeless.”

Bly Markis “had just finished three weeks’ probation after spending time in jail on drug charges, said street nurse Thea Prescod … She’d wear clothes she picked up from drop-ins,” said Prescod. She had this amazing gift to make it work. She looked like she got (an outfit) off a runway ‘ … In her ever-changing shoulder bags, Markis would carry a change of clothes, a brush and makeup, said Prescod … Markis spent her nights sleeping in a protected nook of the west wall of the … Sanctuary …”

CBC News reported that those “who knew the 33-year-old mourned her Monday at a place she had frequented – the Sanctuary, a faith-based centre … that helps the homeless … California was beautiful. She was tall and thin and had long, reddish-blonde hair,’ recalled street pastor Patrick Sullivan. She was sweet and gentle and was just a very special person.’”

A University of Toronto graduate student wrote on his blog that the impact of Ms. Markis’ death for him went “well beyond the fact that” it “occurred two short blocks from my apartment. In fact, I knew the victim … a woman who I had met several times in my weekly street outreach walk that I have been participating in for the past year through Lazarus Rising and Sanctuary Ministries … I knew her only as California’. She was sincere and polite. She was pretty, and had a nice laugh. She was one of a few people I’ve met on the street who have taught me that you can maintain your dignity and keep a sense of joy in life in spite of the greatest challenges. She was the kind of person that I think anyone would like to have as a friend.”

The Harper crime agenda …

On Thursday, April 26, just two days before Bly Markis was murdered in “an underground stairwell at Yonge and Bloor streets,” Canada’s Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, had “delivered a kickoff speech” on his minority government’s crime agenda, in the GTA edge city of Thornhill – west of Yonge Street, and many miles north of Bloor.

As explained in the Globe and Mail: “Reported crime rates have generally fallen over the past 15 years. In his speech, however, Mr. Harper remarked on how crime has risen since he was a boy in the 1960s … Even if Canada’s crime rates are low by international standards, they are still very high by our own historical standards,’ Mr. Harper told an awards dinner for the York Regional Police Force … When I was a boy growing up in Toronto, we knew nothing of street gangs or crack houses. And gun crime was almost unheard of. That began to change in the 1960s. And during the next three decades, the violent-crime rate in this country more than tripled.’”

The Globe and Mail went on: “While it’s true that reported crime rates are far higher than when Mr. Harper, born in 1959, was a child, he didn’t mention that they have been declining relatively steadily since 1992 … There was a dramatic increase in the 1960s and 1970s in most of the Western world, which … has never been adequately explained, University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob said.” In Canada crime rates “peaked in the early 1990s, and then drifted downward,’ he said … That’s especially true of the overall crime rate, which fell almost 25 per cent from 10,342 crime incidents per 100,000 people in 1991 to 7,761 in 2005.”

No doubt, because Bly Markis was a homeless person, her very sad fate will not seem as unsettling to the great majority of us who are not homeless – and are thus unlikely to find ourselves in the circumstances associated with Ms. Markis’ murder. This is not like the case of the innocent teenage girl who was killed by a stray bullet, during a gunfight near a downtown Toronto record store on Yonge Street, on Boxing Day 2005 – less than a month before the January 23, 2006 election that gave Mr. Harper’s Conservatives their present slender minority government in Ottawa (with some 36% of the cross-Canada popular vote).

On the other hand, if the Boxing Day 2005 shootings did help bring Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to office in the 2006 election, it wasn’t because they so alarmed the people who actually live in the City of Toronto. Mr. Harper’s Conservatives currently have no seats in Toronto proper at all. (And Mr. Harper himself has now spent most of his adult life in Calgary, Alberta – and lately the kinder and gentler Canadian federal capital of Ottawa, of course.)

As the Globe and Mail has also reported, a wider and more genuinely troubling “summer of the gun’ that hit Toronto in 2005 attracted national attention to crime and especially gun crimes, and all political parties promised tougher action in the last election … But the near doubling of gun homicides in the city in 2005 – to 52 from 27 the previous year – was followed by a drop to 29 in 2006, roughly the same number as in each year from 2001 to 2004.”

No more “Toronto the Good”?

Like Stephen Harper, I grew up in Toronto in an earlier era. And in my case it was, alas, as long ago as the 1950s. I’d say that was a more innocent time than today. But I don’t know that I’d entirely agree with Mr. Harper’s pronouncement that “when I was a boy growing up in Toronto, we knew nothing of street gangs or crack houses. And gun crime was almost unheard of. That began to change in the 1960s.”

Certainly, so far as I can remember, there were no crack houses – though I wouldn’t say from my own necessarily limited and aging observations that Toronto is exactly swimming in crack houses today. But the great schoolyard enthusiasm when I grew up (in the Vaughan Road and St. Clair area, for those who may know where that is) was the adventures of the bank-robbing Boyd Gang, and their struggles with the police.

Of course, the Boyd Gang is no doubt not quite what Mr. Harper means when he talks about “street gangs” and urges that “gun crime was almost unheard of.” Gun crime does seem to me something that is more in the air than it used to be, and this is a troubling trend. (The Boyd Gang certainly had guns. But it never occurred to me when I was growing up that the likes of the Boyd Gang might ever actually shoot someone like me. The Boxing Day shootings of 2005 were alarming because they did bring this kind of thought home.)

At the same time, things are being done by way of public policy in Toronto to address the problems that lie behind the more troubling sides of the local crime scene. Various events surrounding the case of Bly Markis in late April and early May 2007 seem to bring this point home – even if they have finally not proved of much use to Ms. Markis herself. To me you need to bring both perhaps somewhat stiffer attitudes to law and order and more aggressive social policy to bear on the problems of crime in the city today. Mr. Harper’s federal Conservatives, like Mike Harris’s provincial Conservatives here in Ontario a few years back, seem to focus far too much on just the law and order side of the ledger – which might even make things worse.

Besides, I wouldn’t say that I suddenly felt less safe in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s – or otherwise seriously noticed that some earlier age of “peace, order, and good government” (as Canada’s Constitution Act 1867 says) suddenly “began to change in the 1960s” (as Mr. Harper puts it). I still feel pretty safe in virtually all of the city that I’m ever anywhere near myself.

In the end Toronto the Good (from the title of a local book first published in 1898) has always had its rough edges, as strange as this may seem from some points of view. (Read, e.g., Morley Callaghan’s 1920s book on the city, Strange Fugitive, or Michael Ondaatje’s much more recent book about the city in the 1920s, In the Skin of a Lion. Or the expatriate British historian Goldwin Smith’s complaints about the “boy problem” [i.e. "street gangs"?] in the Toronto of the 1890s, in his book on Canada and the Canadian Question.)

It is no doubt very important for public policy to keep working at smoothing these rough edges off, in whatever forms they arise as one age leads to the next. Yet as the case of Bly Markis also seems to remind us, sometimes even quite beautiful women want to pursue and even cultivate the rough edges of the city, for their own complicated reasons. And sometimes these rough edges hurt them very badly – just by chance, but the chances are much greater if you play this way.

The video surveillance may have helped police solve the case (or allegedly solve at this stage of course). But it didn’t finally prevent Ms. Markis’ murder. And it is not altogether easy to see how any other kind of public (or private) policy could have done much better. Various people and support networks were trying to help Ms. Markis, and she was trying to help herself. Her alleged killer has the kind of relatives who “helped convince the suspect to turn himself in.” And yet the 33-year-old “beautiful … tall and thin … long, reddish-blonde-hair” lady is now dead all the same. That is what finally seems so very sad about the whole thing. And it is probably not a sadness that Stephen Harper, or any other federal politician, can really do very much to relieve.

Charged with the two murders is “Chris Little, 35, the estranged husband of Crocker.” Full of grief at what happened is “Toronto radio sports announcer Rick Ralph,” 37 – the ex-husband of Paula Menendez, and a new boyfriend of Julie Crocker. The story must in some way be about how things can suddenly go very wrong, when romantic passion gets out of hand. But the murders were “carried out with disturbing brutality.” Life in the edge-city suburbs can run dark and deep, no matter how bright the surface appears.

Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice … ?

The local TV Ontario Saturday night movie, just after the Menendez-Crocker murders hit the press, was the 1969 probe of the perils of free love, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (with Natalie Wood, and music by Quincy Jones).

It may have been strictly a coincidence, and planned months in advance. But Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice inevitably offered one model for at least something about the mystery of Rick Ralph, Paula Menendez, Chris Little, and Julie Crocker. On Valentine’s Day, Wednesday, February 14, the press had already reported that Inspector Bill Faulkner “wouldn’t comment on whether the two couples socialized together before their marriages ended.”

On the morning of February 15, 2007 “Toronto radio sports announcer Rick Ralph released a short statement … saying these past few days have been a time of enormous grief for the families of the victims.’” (A particular sad note is that Julie Crocker, an “ad account manager at radio station CHFI leaves behind two girls, 4 and 3, who were sleeping as she was killed and who are now with relatives.”)

This was “Ralph’s first comment since the bodies of his ex-wife Paula Menendez and his new girlfriend Julie Crocker were found in a Markham home early Monday morning” (February 12). He “went on to say that he wants his privacy and will not be making any further statements.”

You have to respect Rick Ralph’s natural wish for his privacy, even if he is a radio sportscaster. In Southern Ontario, as in similar places in other parts of the North American continent and the global village, it still doesn’t do to talk too much about such things in public. Yet a few bare facts about unusual murders often get reported in the media. Some parts of the public feel they need to know at least that much. They may not be entirely mistaken. And in the case of the Menendez-Crocker edge-city murders some of the bare facts are especially striking.

On Valentine’s Day the press was reporting that, two days before, Julie Crocker “was found in her bed with her throat slashed … Downstairs in the garage of the home Crocker once shared with” accused murderer Chris Little (“95 Larkin Blvd in Markham”), Paula Menendez “was found hanging from the rafters, her hands and feet bound.” An autopsy confirmed Crocker “died from sharp force trauma to the neck.” Menendez “was strangled with a ligature. Co-workers told reporters her twin sister delivered a baby the day she was killed.”

What could have gone wrong?

There are a lot of baffling pieces to the puzzle of just what has happened here. The accused murderer and estranged husband of Julie Crocker, Chris Little, “who worked for a company that specialized in fibre optics, was seen at a … car dealership Saturday [February 10], making arrangements to swap the names on two car leases in his and Julie Crocker’s names …

“He was telling me that he and Julie, well it was over for them,’ a man who didn’t want his name used but who spoke to Little that day said. But he said it was amicable and they had a plan and they were working it out. He seemed together’ … The man said Little appeared quite calm.” Three days later Chris Little “looked downcast and forlorn as he made a video appearance” at a courthouse. He “told Justice of the Peace Linda DeBartolo he understood the charges against him before he was remanded to March 9.”

Oddly enough: “It was Little who called police from inside the home, around 3:30 a.m.” in the early morning of Monday, February 12. He “told the 911 operator that he had found two women dead in the home,’ but did not confess to the killings.” Police apparently “initially believed they were attending a murder-suicide.” And the press has reported that some “friends and relatives of Little have said they believe he stumbled on a murder-suicide at Crocker’s home.”

The police rather quickly came to a different conclusion, and charged Chris Little with the murders. It is not too hard to see why. The only way a murder-suicide scenario would appear to square with the known facts would be if Julie Crocker had somehow managed to strangle Paula Menendez, then hang her body from the rafters in her garage with “her hands and feet bound” (or vice-versa?), and then go back to her bedroom and slit her own throat.

At the same time, when the funerals for the two victims were held – Julie Crocker’s on Friday, February 16, and Paula Menendez’s on Saturday the 17th – the press was reporting that “both families” were “denying the accusations against Little.” It has also been reported that: “Death notices published in Toronto newspapers described Ms. Crocker as Mr. Little’s beloved wife’ and members of the accused man’s family have said they don’t believe he’s guilty of the crime.”

Police have nonetheless “indicated that investigators are working on a theory that Mr. Little abducted Ms. Menendez [from her home in nearby Etobicoke] and drove her to Ms. Crocker’s home [in Markham], where he allegedly killed both of them.” The police have also “said it was obviously a homicide that [has] very complicated relationships involved.’”

Then there is Chris Little’s “downcast and forlorn” look when he made his “video appearance” in court. And then there is a press report that “Little has hired lawyer John Rosen for his defence.” And Rosen “is well known for his defence of Paul Bernardo.” (Who in 1991 and 1992, in company with his kinky wife Karla Homolka, perpetrated the two most grisly and appalling sex slayings in recent Southern Ontario memory – despite appearing very much like an ordinary, quite bright, middle-class white guy with a university degree, who worked at “the Toronto office of PricewaterhouseCoopers“).

The world of Toronto radio stations, you might say, can be a bit fast (like similar worlds in many other parts of the global village today, no doubt). Julie Crocker worked at a Toronto radio station. And so did (and does) her new boyfriend (and Paula Menendez’s ex-husband) Rick Ralph. (It is also a bit interesting to note, maybe – and even while respecting his request for privacy, that Rick Ralph attended Paula Menendez’s funeral on Saturday, but not Julie Crocker’s on Friday.)

Paula Menendez, however, “was a popular physiotherapist,” and Chris Little (as above) “worked for a company that specialized in fibre optics.” The sometimes complicated love lives of people who work at Toronto radio stations are probably not all that much faster than those who work at many other places (though not insurance companies, maybe again).

An old friend who had been in the wedding party of Chris Little and Jule Crocker 10 years ago “described the pair as good, honest, normal hard-working people.’” A neighbour said “the family appeared as normal as can be.’” A close friend of Paula Menendez has said she “was in high spirits the weekend before her death … Paula was happy in her life and had a lot of things going for her.”

At Julie Crocker’s funeral, a relative said : “There doesn’t seem to be any way to explain, understand or fathom this tragedy.” The “Revered Burden,” who “conducted the hour-long ceremony,” agreed: “We do not know why this has happened … In the fullness of God’s time we will understand.”

Meanwhile, one or two further clues could come to light when Chris Little next appears in court, on Friday, March 9. Some dyed-in-the-wool local observers may sadly think back to 1898, when C.S. Clark published his near-legendary book Toronto the Good (in Montreal), with its telling motto on the title page: “Not necessarily Toronto alone but every city in America.” Others will remember what an insightful CIA operative is reputed to have said in the 1970s: “You can do anything you want in Toronto, so long as you don’t spit on the sidewalk.”

UPDATE: On Wednesday, November 25, 2009 a jury of his peers convicted Chris Little of Markham, Ontario of the double murder of his ex-wife, Julie C rocker, and Paula Menendez, the ex-wife of Julie Crocker’s lover, radio sportscaster Rick Ralph.  See “Edge-city suburbs can run dark and deep … jealous husband guilty in Greater Toronto double murder.”

One of the eight victims was actually from Chatham in Southwestern Ontario. Only three were from the City of Toronto. The other four were from the suburban to vaguely rural GTA locations of Keswick, Milton, Oakville, and Sutton. The bodies were found in abandoned cars just west of St. Thomas, far away from any definition of Greater Toronto.

Strangely enough, the five people charged with the murders are from the same Southwestern Ontario countryside whimsically evoked by the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in his droll 1960s memoir of his Canadian childhood called The Scotch. The crime scene is right in the Galbraith family-farm homeland around Dutton, Iona, Iona Station, and Shedden.

One senior police officer has “described the shootings as an internal cleansing’,” within a local chapter of the Texas-headquartered biker gang known as the Bandidos. The “general public” has “little to fear.” But as the Associated Press in the USA has put it: “The mostly farming families in Iona and other nearby townships – each with a few hundred residents – were still stunned Tuesday by the kind of violence usually reserved for big cities.”

Remembering the Black Donnellys …

In fact, the notion that this kind of violence is usually reserved for big cities has always been something of a myth. To those steeped deeply in old Ontario folklore, the early 21st century Bandido biker massacre in the old agrarian democracy of The Scotch is bound to bring to mind the late 19th century massacre of the Black Donnellys – in the Lucan area of the rural Southwest, some distance due north of Shedden and Iona Station and so forth.

The Donnelly murders in the Lucan area, on February 4, 1880, had only five victims. And from this angle the eight victims further south, sometime on April 7 and/or 8, 2006, do add up to “the worst mass murder in Ontario history.”

The old Donnelly murders were also a more  exclusively local phenomenon. The Donnellys were an irascible family of Irish immigrants who quarreled with many of their neighbours. Suddenly, in the middle of a late 19th century Canadian winter, five of them turned up dead. And in the end “no one was ever found guilty of the crime.”

(Though, as it happens, this coming June 2006 you can see a play called The Donnelly Re-Trial at The Old Courthouse in the Southwestern Ontario regional metropolis of London – London, Ontario, that is, and of course not London, England. “The Donnelly Re-Trial re-creates the tension of the original court proceedings, and attempts to determine what happened during the early hours of February 4th, 1880. The play is staged in the same room where the original trial took place … and contains the actual words of the participants … carefully researched and edited to create an engrossing, living theatrical experience. At the end of each performance, a jury consisting of audience members will reach a verdict of guilty or not guilty, based on the original evidence presented to them … GET YOUR TICKETS NOW.”)

Some early theories about April 7/8, 2006 …

Unlike the old Donnelly murders, the Ontario Bandido biker massacre in early April 2006 was clearly not strictly a local affair in the rural Southwest. Everyone’s local world nowadays is more inter-connected with other worlds elsewhere.

Even setting aside the Greater Toronto Area, the Donnelly murders had no conceivable connection at all with the Bandido biker gang headquarters several thousand miles away in Galveston, Texas. But the best information at the moment seems to be that the April 7/8, 2006 murders probably did not have much to do with Galveston either.

Wednesday, April 12 reports in both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have begun to clarify the picture – a little.

In Canada the Texas-headquartered Bandidos biker gang has “just one 12-member chapter in Toronto and a smaller, junior chapter in Winnipeg.” There were some early theories that “Bandidos headquarters in Texas ordered the killings” in Ontario, in some connection with larger North American struggles against the Hell’s Angels biker gang. But these theories are now thought implausible by “police sources on both sides of the border.”

Instead, what happened in the Southwestern Ontario Galbraithian homeland on the evening of April 7 and early morning of April 8 is said to be much more like an “angry confrontation” within the Canadian Bandidos’ Toronto chapter – probably also involving a drug deal – that somehow got out of hand and “spiralled into a bloodbath.”

Again, quite a few in the Bandidos’ Toronto chapter actually live (or lived) outside the City of Toronto proper. In particular Wayne Kellestine, 56 – a man with a “track record of erratic, violent behaviour” and a “documented love of weapons” – currently lives in Southwestern Ontario, in a “rundown farmhouse, near Dutton.”

(Dutton is a place about which even John Kenneth Galbraith had a few vaguely harsh words, in his book on The Scotch. But Kellestine’s residence has also been described in the media as an “Iona Station farm” – which seems perilously close to the old Galbraith homestead itself).

In a nutshell, perhaps, the so-called Toronto chapter of the Bandidos assembled for some purpose at Kellestine’s farmhouse on the evening of April 7. And then, perhaps again, in some almost accidental way one part of the gang wound up murdering another part. (Or, as somewhat alternatively reported in the April 12 Ottawa Sun, “an ex-Bandidos biker said the eight men were taken out when they visited Kellestine to kick him out of the club.’”)

Trying to keeping the cast of characters straight …

Just for the record, five people have now been charged with first-degree murder in the April 7/8 massacre. They include Wayne Kellestine, along with “Erick Niessen, 45, and Kerry Morris, 56, both of Monkton, Ont. [a town considerably north and a bit east of Dutton - and Kerry Morris has subsequently been reported as a resident of nearby Mitchell and not Monkton itself]; Frank Mather, 32, Dutton-Dunwich Township, Ont.; and Brett Gardiner, 21, no fixed address.”

Kellestine is said to be “a prominent member of the Bandidos biker club” (or used to be?). But “Kellestine’s houseguest, Frank Mather, 32″ has apparently “never been a biker,” though he “has a lengthy criminal record.” The exact biker status of the other three who have been charged is unclear. Kerry Morris is a female. The others are males.

(The AP report says “Kellestine was the only member of the Bandidos among those arrested for the killings.” The Ottawa Sun reported earlier that “three Bandidos” – presumably from the Toronto chapter as well – “have not been seen since the murders.” But as of April 13 the Toronto Star has now interviewed these surviving three Bandidos, without revealing their names.)

The eight victims of the massacre include six so-called “full-patch” Bandidos: “George Jesso, 52, of Toronto; George Kriarakis, 28, of Toronto; Luis Manny Raposo, 41, of Toronto; Francesco Salerno, 43, of Oakville, Ont.; John Muscedere, 48, of Chatham, Ont.;” and “Paul Sinopoli, 30, of Sutton, Ont. … Also killed were: Jamie Flanz, 37, of Keswick, Ont., described as a prospect’ member of the gang;” and “Michael Trotta, 31, of Milton, Ont., an associate member.”

It is intriguing as well that even though Wayne Kellestine is known to some associates as a dangerous and unpredictable man, who has spent time in jail over the past several years, some of his country neighbours are surprised that he has been charged with the murders:

“Even if he is a Bandido, he was the nicest man, always respectful,’ said Iona resident Kim Baum, who helps out at the Holland House restaurant, where Kellestine sometimes stopped for coffee or a beer with his Bandido comrades … They never talked about deals when they were in here; I told him that in the beginning, that he could not talk about his deals in here, and he respected that,’ said Marty Angenent, the owner of the Holland House. We don’t treat him like an outcast here.’”

How did the police figure so much of it out so fast?

You may wonder just how the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) managed to charge five people for the April 7/8 massacre as quickly as they did. The April 12 report in the Toronto Star sheds some intriguing light on this side of the story.

On the evening of April 7, police officers from the Durham Region, due east of the City of Toronto, had actually “followed three of eight Bandidos from the Toronto area” to Wayne Kellestine’s rundown farmhouse between Dutton and Iona Station. “Suspecting a major drug deal could be in the works, investigators tailed the trio.” But: “After watching the three men enter the farmhouse, the officers left, assuming the bikers were there for a party.”

For whatever exact reasons, police now seem to believe, “the three Bandidos” were “shot dead, their bodies stuffed into cars that were driven into a field. It’s believed five other Bandidos arrived separately later that night, only to be systematically killed and their bodies similarly disposed of.”

Once the bodies were discovered by a local farmer on the morning of Saturday, April 8, it did not take the OPP too long to discover what the Durham Region police had been up to the night before. And this led investigators straight to both Wayne Kellestine and his farmhouse.

If further legal proceedings confirm that Kellestine and the four others who have been charged are the true perpetrators of the crime, it does still seem a bit odd that they would remain in the area, so that police could conveniently pick them up a few days later. But perhaps that is just another part of Wayne Kellestine’s strange and unpredictable personality.

In any case, more is bound to come on this story. So stay tuned. It does seem to be saying a few interesting things about the way we are today, in both the big cities and the old rural townships of the legendary seed-bed of democracy, down on the North American family farm.

UPDATES: For further developments on this issue see “Ontario Bandido biker murders trial moves into high gear.” For the ultimate resolution: “Life in jail for Bandidos biker killers in Southwestern Ontario.”

Regular readers of the Statistics Canada Daily may confess to some bewilderment over the issue for Wednesday, July 28, 2004. It reported on two different Canadian data series, side by side: “Crime statistics, 2003″ and “Radio listening, fall 2003.” A Mad Magazine reading of the two pieces might imagine they are somehow related. And who knows? Maybe they are.

Youth crime increasing … and other things

Part of the bad news about crime in Canada is that the “national property crime rate rose 4% in 2003, after hitting nearly a 20-year low the year before.” Key categories here are vehicle thefts and residential and business break-ins.

A related and more dramatic contributor to “the increase in overall crime” was that the “rate of counterfeiting increased 72% in 2003.” (Some of this increase, however, “may be attributable to an increase in the detection of counterfeit currency, rather than solely an increase in counterfeiting activity.”)

The good news is that “violent crime” generally continued to decrease in 2003. “The national homicide rate fell 7% last year to its lowest level in over 35 years. A total of 548 homicides were reported to police, 34 fewer than in 2002.”

Similarly, the “national sexual assault rate declined 5% to its lowest level in almost 20 years.” There were “just under 23,000 Level 1 sexual assaults reported by police in 2003, the least serious form of this offence.”

At the same time, “the rate of robberies rose 5%, the first gain since 1996.” Across Canada there were “more than 28,000 robberies in 2003 … nearly half were committed without a weapon.”

There was also more crime generally in some parts of the country than in others – and among certain sectors of the national population. Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and New Brunswick had the lowest total crime rates. The three northern territories had the highest.

Finally, looking at non-geographic sectors everywhere, the “crime rate among young people aged 12 to 17, as measured by the total number accused by police, increased 5% last year. It was the third gain in the last four years.” Or, as the penultimate headline in the article summarized the point : “Youth crime increasing.”

Guess who’s also been listening to the radio less lately?

It is this last point about youth crime that most impressed someone who worked on the Statistics Canada Daily for July 28, 2004.

Immediately after the crime article there was a crisp report on “Radio listening, fall 2003.” It began with: “The amount of time teenagers aged 12 to 17 spent listening to the radio has declined substantially over the past five years, from 11.3 hours per week in the fall of 1999 to 8.5 hours per week in the fall of 2003.” (The report went on to add that the “same downward trend is observed in teenagers’ television-viewing time.”)

There were other aspects of recent radio trends in Canada that the editors of the Daily felt worth some attention: in particular “Quebec anglophones regain their ranking as the most avid radio listeners;” and “Adult contemporary music continues to dominate, while public radio retains third place.”

But the main focus was on how the “amount of time teenagers spent listening to radio continues to decline.”

Brilliant deductions, etc.

By the end of the radio article, no doubt, many readers of the July 28 Daily wanted to reflect briefly on just what all this recent intelligence on crime and the radio must mean.

And who but the oldest among us could already have forgotten about “Youth crime increasing.”

Then, when you set this beside the declining hours that the same group of people “aged 12 to 17″ have spent listening to the radio, isn’t it obvious enough what you have got?

BETTER RADIO PROGRAMMING CAN PREVENT CRIME.

A serious point somewhere, perhaps …

All this may just reflect what can happen in the depths of Canada’s federal statistical bureaucracy in Ottawa, in the middle of the cherished and always a little whacky far northern summer. But there may be some kind of more serious point too.

Adults and their institutions, one might even guess, are losing influence over people aged 12 to 17, who are in turn more likely to stray into youthful mistakes. Our society in North America is somehow growing more coarse, undisciplined, and unkempt.

Those who also monitor US television, e.g., may have noticed a recent parallel item on MSNBC, or some similar place. An upscale and nicely dressed lady was complaining that the 13-year-old son of an eminent New York executive had recently called her prim and proper 13-year-old daughter “a whore,” because she would not have sex with him.

And yet what does even this really mean? No doubt any kind of social policy that can give 12 to 17 year olds from any strata of society better and more interesting things to do than commit (often enough rather petty property) crime is worthwhile – if it actually works.

Yet upscale and nicely dressed ladies were also complaining about a coarsening of behavior among young people when the age of the radio first began in the 1920s. And then the new radio technology was thought to be an agent for increasing not decreasing youth crime.

The Great Lakes regional fiction of Alice Munro also reminds us that back in the 1940s and 1950s, in the still upright and virtuous small towns of the countryside, almost all teenage boys called almost all teenage girls whores. If Alice Munro is to be believed, quite a few of the girls were just suitably amused in any case.

But where all this finally ought to lead no doubt does remain some form of good question, especially in the middle of the summer. The Statistics Canada Daily would be an even more fascinating publication if its readers could count on this kind of entertainment more often.

THANKS TO THE DEMOCRATIC GENEROSITY OF THE TAXPAYING PEOPLE OF CANADA ANYONE CAN SUBSCRIBE TO THE EMAIL EDITION OF THE STATISTICS CANADA DAILY, FOR FREE, ON THE STATISTICS CANADA WEBSITE:

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