Editorially speaking…
This week, the Chronicles concludes the sad tale of Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 21, British Columbia’s worst unsolved mass murder.
Some of the wreckage of ill-fated CP Air 21. —Dept. of Transport, CBC
How is it, one might ask, that hardly anyone, besides journalists and family descendants, seems to know about it? Is 60 years that long ago? It’s almost as if many us have placed a statute of limitations upon memory.
While researching and writing this story several thoughts have come to mind.
For one, unsolved murders enjoy almost universal fascination for readers and television viewers. They’ve become known as ‘cold cases’ but, genre-wise, they’re hot. I’ve rationalized my own morbidity as the natural inclination for a good story; after all, I’m a professional storyteller. Who needs fiction when you have true crime?
And what’s more intriguing than a mystery?
But that, for me, is the quandary. I’m drawn to stories about unsolved crimes—but almost always left disgruntled, feeling cheated. Am I alone in experiencing a sense of denial that justice hasn’t been served, that there may well be murderers on the streets today, perhaps in our very midst, who have escaped justice?
All of us have been raised in an entertainment culture that invariably has a so-called Hollywood ending; not always a happy ending, perhaps, but at least one that is defined: The End. What we’ve come to think of, in real life tragedy, as closure.
The very thought that someone has successfully committed an unspeakable atrocity but not suffered punishment leaves me not just disappointed by another of life’s unsatisfactory realities, but angry.
It is so wrong, it’s so unjust, it’s so........sad.
Back to CP Air 21: As readers shall see, 60 years later, the bomber remains unidentified. The best that investigators could achieve after exhaustive effort—and it’s accepted that they did their jobs well—was to narrow the suspects down to four passengers, two of whom are more suspicious than the others.
Meaning, of course, that the murderer also killed himself. Why he—and no one questions that it was a male passenger—chose to take 51 other innocent people including children with him is another of the many questions that will go forever unanswered.
There’s another rub to this. Four passengers have been tarred with suspicion. But the bombing of CP Air 21 wasn’t a conspiracy, it was the work of a single killer—three of those passengers who’ve been named as suspects were innocent. Meaning they’ve been victimized twice-over—murdered, then vilified as suspects in plotting and committing their own deaths. Their families have had to live with a legacy of grief while wondering in their hearts if their father or their uncle was, in fact, a mass murderer.
And they never will know.
In telling this story I’ve made every effort to be accurate. I’ve identified the four parties, two of whom are considered to be the most likely murderer based upon evidence unearthed at the time and since bolstered by modern day psychological profiling. But I remind readers that three of these men were innocent victims of the fourth and I have no wish to besmirch their memories.
It’s enough that they were murdered once; I don’t want to murder them again in print.
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Survivors of those killed on CP Flight 21 were young children at the time. Ten years ago, the Globe and Mail located Didi Henderson who was five when her mother was widowed with three youngsters. Murray Covello and his brother lost both parents –on their way to the funeral of Mr. Covello’s brother’s who’d been killed the day before in a construction accident.
“I think about them every day of my life,” he said.
Chuck Shaw-MacLaren, 88 when he was interviewed, recalled being called as an ambulance driver to the scene by police and having to sleep overnight in his vehicle while it poured. Investigators would later complain that the rain likely washed away clues that would have been helpful in their research. Shaw-MacLaren, however, remembers his relief, come daylight, when he saw the carnage “wasn’t as grisly as it could have been”.
What he did see had haunted him for 50 years.
The most that Mrs. Henderson has asked for is that the victims be remembered, not just by their families but by the public.”Whoever did it, they willingly carried dynamite on board to kill themselves and 51 other people.
“So it’s more than just a tragedy or an accident. It was kind of an act of terror, before we coined the term.”
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