‘In Loving Memory’ of Molly Justice

I’ve always felt that I grew up with Molly Justice, that she was family even though we weren’t related and she was gone before I was born.

Nevertheless, she is part of my DNA.

My Aunt Ada’s best friend, she’d lived one house down and across the road from our home on Brett Avenue, just east of Swan Lake, in Saanich. Ada and Uncle Cec lived next door to us; she was expecting when Molly Justice died and named her daughter, my cousin Molly, for her.

This January 18th will be the 80th anniversary of Molly Justice’s murder beside the railway tracks, just two blocks from her home.

Ten years ago, for the 70th anniversary, Jennifer and I made the trip to my childhood stomping grounds of Saanich to pay homage to Molly by attaching a poster to a tree beside the former CN Railway tracks, what’s now the Galloping Goose Trail, where her mutilated body was found in January 1943.

It was my way of keeping alive a family tradition. For over 40 years until her death, my grandmother, Ellen Green, placed an In Memoriam ad in the Victoria Colonist:  “In loving memory of Molly Justice, taken from us...”

I’ve told the story of Molly Justice several times over the years but not here in the Chronicles and it has recently been retold in a book on unsolved B.C. crimes. In answer to a Times Colonist reporter years ago, when he asked me whether I thought there was merit in their printing yet another story on Molly, I replied that I’d prefer that Molly Justice be remembered as a murder victim than that she be a murder victim and forgotten.

So I’ll tell her story again, next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Fifteen-year-old Molly Justice photographed in front of my Aunt Ada’s house, 870 Brett Ave., Saanich, Victoria. —Family photo