Editorially speaking...
Well, we finally did it, a little bit late but better than not at all.
For two weeks we’d tried to make it down to Saanich to mark the 80th anniversary of the murder of 15-year-old Molly Justice.
My Aunt Ada, left, and Molly Justice in front of 870 Brett Ave. which, although remodelled, is still identifiable to me after all these years. Not so my old house next door which I thought had been demolished; I’ve been assured that, according to land registry records, my childhood home still stands after a massive renovation. Ca 1922, today’s 866 Brett looks nothing like I remember. (That’s Ada’s dog Mickey in the foreground, by the way.)
However, trying to synchronize movements between four people who live in Duncan, Langford and Victoria while balancing weather and work schedules, proved to be a challenge.
But this past Sunday with its glorious spring sunshine (even if it was a little nippy in the shade), everything and everyone came together. We all met at the Saanich municipal hall parking lot immediately across the intersection of Darwin Avenue and Lochsyde Regional Trail (the former Canadian National Railways grade).
Ten years ago, Jennifer and I started at Carey Road where Molly got off the bus on her way home from work, Jan. 18, 1943. This time, we began our pilgrimage, accompanied by friends Bill Irvine and Blake MacKenzie, at Darwin Avenue and within 100 feet of where Molly’s body was discovered by a couple returning from skating on Swan Lake. They didn’t actually notice her body but her parcels containing Christmas presents lying beside the tracks and splashed with blood.
Otherwise, I’m sure, police and searchers, upon her being reported missing, wouldn’t have found her until the next day. Not that it mattered to Molly; she’d bled to death from dozens of stab wounds.
This time we walked Molly’s path in reverse, from Darwin to Carey Road, and completed her intended route to Brett Ave. where she lived, one house down and across from Aunt Ada and Uncle Cec, our next door neighbours.
In Ever Loving of Memory of Molly Justice
Murdered near this spot, January 18, 1943 80 Years Ago
My simple poster and artificial flowers, stapled to a tree. As I did 10 years ago for the 70th anniversary of Molly’s death, I kept it short and sweet: “In ever loving memory of Molly Justice, murdered near this spot, January 18, 1943. 80 years ago.”
It isn’t much but my well-honed cynicism tells me it won’t last long. I regret that I didn’t notice the shadow across Molly’s picture while I was framing this photo.
Molly Justice
My most profound impression of last Sunday is the enormity of the changes which have occurred since I grew up in the Swan Lake area in the 1950s.
Even in my time, never mind that of Molly who died before I was born, both sides of that stretch of railway track from Carey Road to Swan Street, the back entrance to 861 Brett (still there) where she lived with her mother, brother and stepfather, was dark. Dark because it was undeveloped.
Not so today!
Today, it’s the Uptown Shopping Centre, strip malls, Saanich Municipal Hall, the Pat Bay Highway, modern residences and multi-storey buildings. Mostly, it’s traffic, even on a Sunday. That area in my day was bush, swamp, some commercial greenhouses, small farms, dead end roads and just occasional houses.
Even worse, in 1943, it was wartime. Meaning that there was a government-imposed dim-out. I don’t remember seeing mention in the news and police reports of Molly having had a flashlight. But for those people who walked this stretch of railway tracks to go skating on Swan Lake, Molly and her murderer would have had this lonely and dark stretch of CNR to themselves.
Yes, it was a shortcut for her, much quicker than getting off the bus at Douglas and Saanich roads, a lonely stretch itself that I can attest to from firsthand experience, having walked it many times at night when returning from sea cadets.
Sadly, Molly chose to take the quicker route home and met her death at the hands of a sexual predator. As noted in my post, my mother’s mother, Ellen Green, who loved Molly like a daughter, kept her memory alive for 40 years with her In Memoriam ads in the Victoria Colonist.
Since Granny’s death in 1989, I’ve tried to perpetuate Molly Justice’s memory by writing about her in newspapers, magazines, books and online, and, on the 10th anniversaries, placing a notice and flowers where she died.
I’m sorry that I can’t promise to be around to do it again 10 years from now.
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Years before genealogy became popular and easy thanks to the internet, friend and reader Bill Irvine began researching his family history. He recently gave me some of the newsletters he published and this quote by an ancestor leaped out at me:
“Storytelling [is] a craft, just the same as a carpenter or a stone mason or a bricklayer, & not just any one [can] tell a story.”
Speaking from my own humble experience, I’ll agree that writing (storytelling) is a craft, one that, like most skills, can be improved upon and becomes easier through practice. But I also believe there’s something more to it, something in our genes. (Like an artist, a poet, a born mechanic.)
I like to tell my friends that writing is work. And it can be, particularly the research. But once that’s done the words—usually—begin to flow, one after the other, until, like laying bricks, the ‘job’s’ done.
Beats real work every time!
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You can view me revisiting Molly Justice's murder site on Facebook:
Blake MacKenzie was live in Gold Trails and Ghost Towns.
Molly Justice Unsolved Murder 80th Anniversary Live with T.W. Paterson History Author