Evil Agnes – The Ugly — British Columbia Chronicles

Too late, as I admitted last week, did I realize I had the perfect play on the popular Spaghetti western movie title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

With a difference—women.

By too late, I meant the correct sequence: I’d already led with Belle Castle, The Bad (in the sense that she was a ‘fallen’ woman who redeemed herself too late for love), making Nellie Cashman, The Good, the second instalment by default.

**But now we’re back on track with Agnes, The Ugly.**

The original roadhouse at 108 Mile on the Cariboo Wagon Road looks rustic but innocuous enough in this photo. —*BC Archives*

Chronicles readers familiar with this iconic movie will remember that Clint Eastwood was The Good (in name if not in fact), Eli Wallach (who stole the show in my opinion) was The Bad, and Lee Van Cleef (“the man with no eyes”) was The Ugly.

**But back to the Chronicles: If Nell was The Good and Belle The Bad, that leaves us with Agnes as The Ugly. Here goes...**

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Having been enamoured of B.C. history since my early teens, you can imagine my joy when I recently turned up this 1991 clipping from my own local newspaper, the Cowichan News Leader. The column itself was entitled, “A Day In Court” by journalist Teresa Mallam.

This one was headlined, “Women Who Kill.” Halfway through her piece, Ms. Mallam noted, “there are women serial killers too”. She really caught my attention with:

“Then there was legendary Agnus MacVee. During the 1880’s, the bodies of 59 farmers, miners and young girls were found in area lakes in B.C.’s interior. All stripped of their gold and belongings. All of them prey to the buxom, blue-eyed Scots woman who owned a prosperous hotel and who offered, food, liquor, lodging and a bevy of young women for the pleasure of weary travellers...”

Agnus (or Agnes) may have been buxom but this photo, which appears to be reproduced from a newspaper, doesn’t suggest she was blonde and blue-eyed.

According to columnist Mallam, Agnus was wanted for seven murders in her native Scotland. She, like most of those who migrated to the Cariboo, was looking for gold. Unlike most fortune hunters, however, she was out to mine the miners, so to speak—to the tune, legend has it, of $150,000 which has never been found!

What brought her lethal career to an abrupt end? Why, she... Oops, I’m getting ahead of myself. What a story!

But: why hadn’t I encountered Agnus before? I’ve been researching B.C. history, including crimes, for my entire adult life. Yet, so far as I can recall, I hadn’t heard of this remarkable serial killer until I found this 1991 newspaper column while shuffling files over Christmas break. Agnus who—?

What did come to mind was another, eerily similar case: the “Bloody Benders” of Kansas about whom I’d read in an American magazine. Briefly: The Bender family, composed of John Sr., wife Elvira (or Almira), son and daughter John Jr. and Kate, operated a roadhouse in Labette County, 1871-72. So they identified themselves, although it was suspected that John Jr. and Kate were in fact husband and wife.

The murderous Bender family. From left to right: John Bender Sr., Elvira, John Jr., Kate —*Wikipedia* (John Towner James, Author)

Whatever the case, the family offered overnight accommodation to travellers and it’s believed they murdered as many as a dozen to 20 of them for their valuables, burying the bodies in their own secret cemetery until they were discovered. It’s not known whether the Benders escaped or were lynched.

When the authorities investigated the abandoned Bender homestead, they found a cemetery of murder victims. —*www.humanitieskansas.org*

So much for the Bloody Benders in Kansas; let’s get back to Agnus MacVee in the Cariboo. Bless Google, there she was, on over half-a-dozen sites with some slight variations in the spelling of Agnus/Agnes and MacVee/McVee, and dates.

Let’s start at the tip of the iceberg, Wikipedia: “Agnus McVee was said to be a Canadian serial killer. McVee ran a hotel and store at 108 Mile House on the Cariboo Wagon Road from 1875 to 1885 during the Cariboo Gold Rush [sic]. Along with her husband Jim McVee and her son-in-law Al Riley, she is said to have killed many miners for their gold and kidnapped women for sale to miners as white slaves...”

A promising start, to say the least!

As for her kidnapping sideline, besides murdering miners for their gold, she allegedly kept as many as eight women tied up in her basement whom she physically and mentally abused until they were resigned to becoming ‘wives’ to wealthy miners. The single cited case is that of a Jim McDonald who agreed to buy a 17-year-old girl.

But the deal fell through when husband Jim decided it was easier to just murder McDonald for his money. Supposedly, an enraged Agnus divorced him on the spot—by poisoning him.

Somehow, perhaps while her attention was distracted with murdering Jim, the teen-aged girl managed to escape and report everything to, and I quote, the North West Mounted Police. (We had the B.C. Provincial Police in those days.) Upon finding MacVee’s body and several girls imprisoned in the basement, they arrested Agnus and her brother-in-law Al Riley.

“...Charged and convicted of murder and kidnapping,” they were “incarcerated in the New Westminster jail” where, in 1885, Agnus killed herself by taking poison shortly before Riley went to the gallows.

At the risk of repeating myself, what a story!

Another view of 108 Mile roadhouse where Agnus and Jim MacVee and Al Riley preyed upon unsuspecting travellers, male and female. —*BC Archives*

Next, let’s look at cariboogoldrush.com/people/agnes about Cariboo Gold Rush Women: Here, in this much more detailed blog, Agnus isn’t just wanted in her native Scotland for seven murders but for “three beatings”. This account makes her sound like a Viking—beautiful, blue-eyed, and able to lift a 400-pound sack of grain with ease!

It gets even better.

When unattached young women running away from home or seeking a husband in the Cariboo diggings lodged overnight in the MacVee hotel, the muscular Agnus would overpower them and “tie them up with ropes that she kept hidden beneath her skirt” until she could sell them to unscrupulous buyers.

We’re also given an approximate date, “a bright March morning in 1875,” and a name, that of “prosperous” miner Henry Dawson. How prosperous? Supposedly, he was carrying no less than $11,000 in gold dust and nuggets when he entered into negotiations for a bride.

As it happened, Agnus, husband Jim and Al Riley, Agnus’s son-in-law—“a scheming, muscular young brute”—who served as the hotel’s bartender, had decided to rob him of his gold. This was easily accomplished with Riley shooting Dawson in the back and killing him instantly.

Agnus’ son-in-law Al Riley, left, and husband Jim MacVee.

So far, so good; but then they became careless. Instead of burying the body, or otherwise properly disposing of it, they simply dumped it in the lake adjoining the property—where it was discovered the same day!

Here, the blogger quotes from “the official record of the local authorities” to the effect that Henry Dawson was “most foully murdered” by a robber who escaped with his personal possessions and horse. Apparently, this precipitated a search of other lakes in the area—and the discovery of no fewer than 58 more bodies.

For Agnes, the end came in a New Westminster jail cell in June 1885 where she chose to evade hanging by taking poison and leaving her son-in-law (there’s no mention here of husband Jim MacVee) to go to the gallows by himself.

As for her accumulated treasure of victims’ wealth, estimated to be between $100-150,000, only $8500 is said to have been recovered.

So wrote cariboogoldrush.com. In a second post, a new twist is offered in the form of a tall, strapping gambler named Macdonald. For Agnus, married or no, it was love at first sight so, instead of conspiring in his murder, she agrees to sell him a 17-year-old girl for $4000, and he and his ‘bride’ head out on the Cariboo Wagon Road on horseback. But, unknown to Agnus, Jim follows them; upon his return, he admits to her that he’d killed Macdonald and got $8000 in gold coins for his trouble.

That would be over a quarter of a million dollars today, more than enough, one would think, to assuage Agnus’s anger at Jim’s defying her wishes. And so Jim must have thought the next morning when she served him a hearty breakfast. Minutes later, he was writing in agony—poisoned.

Meaning another body to be disposed of, and she and Al Riley proceeded to do just that. And the girl they’d sold to Macdonald? She’d escaped when Jim MacVee ambushed them on the road. Police, upon searching the MacVee hotel, found other women chained together and half-starved; in the ashes of the hotel’s fireplaces, human bones.

You wouldn’t think that such a tale could be made even more colourful—but it’s been done at “108 Hotel of Murder,” www.historical.bc.ca/murder.

This somewhat fuller version, which prints out to four pages and includes photos of both MacVees and Al Riley, ca 1871, is almost a carbon copy of cariboogoldrush.com but with considerably greater detail. If not by the same author, who copied whom?

My favourite nugget is a description of Agnus’s no-nonsense approach to kidnapping women: she’d simply throw them to the ground and hogtie them like a calf with ropes she carried under her skirt. And, if a “girl” refused to accept her fate as a miner’s wife, why Agnus just “threw” her into one of the hotel’s seven fireplaces!

The murder of Henry Dawson is described in detail:

First, Al Riley plies him with whisky while Agnus hides in the barn and Jim MacVee hitches up the wagon
Riley excuses himself and steps outside where Agnus hands him a rifle
Riley fires through an open window, striking Dawson in the back
They bundle the body into the wagon so Jim can dump it in a nearby lake.

A major difference in this version is that Dawson’s murder was at the start of their 10-year-long murder spree, not at the end. Victims included “madams of houses of ill repute, farmers, merchants, miners and other prospective buyers of her young girls who visited this isolated hotel”. Bodies, 59 in all, were simply dumped in neighbouring lakes, no one it seems, ever being reported missing or questioning the epidemic of corpses.

Only lone travellers were at risk at 108 Mile, the MacVees kknowing better than to try to molest the professional teamsters who came through regularly. —*BC Archives*

And the money rolled in, most of it in raw gold and coins, with Jim selling victims’ horses in Fort Kamloops (which, the record shows, was abandoned in 1872).

As we’ve seen, it all began to come apart when Agnus became infatuated with the younger Macdonald and ordered him spared. What passed between Agnus and her frustrated fellow conspirators is described in full, complete with dialogue, followed by Jim’s secretly ambushing Macdonald, Agnus’s spitefully poisoning him, the girl’s escape, the arrival of police, their arrests, trials and convictions, and Agnus’s outwitting the hangman by taking poison she’d hidden on her person.

According to this account, a resident of 108 Mile House dug up $2500 in gold nuggets and coins in 1924 and a second cache, this one of $6000, was later unearthed during the construction of an airstrip.

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But, but, but...

Where’s the documentation for any of this? Again, I asked myself, why hadn’t I encountered this tale of mass murder during my decades of researching the Cariboo gold rush and B.C. criminal history? Take the infamous Boone Helm, to name just one: he’s been written up dozens of times, in newspaper and magazine articles, in books. Where in blazes did Agnus come from?

It quickly became apparent that my doubts were shared by others who, having encountered the story before me, had already set out to prove or debunk the legendary Agnus MacVee. One of those doubting Thomases (Thomasinas?) was Maryanne Rutledge, president of the 100 Mile and District Historical Society.

She’s convinced that the Agnus MacVee story has its roots in a small and long out-of-print book, Lost Treasures in BC #3) by Larry Lazeo of Fort Langley who claimed to have been told the story by “an old-timer”.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I met Larry (Laurence) Lazeo years ago after he’d published his first small book on lost treasure. I vaguely recall that he was tall, slim, shy and somewhat gangling with blonde facial fuzz. I don’t remember his voice or way of speaking but, from his book, which, to be kind, was extremely crude even for the ‘70s, it was obvious that his grasp of English, as spoken and written, was incomplete.

I went back to the computer, keying in Larry’s name and up came a seller’s site offering a copy of Treasure Trails of British Columbia: A History of Lost Mines and Buried or Sunken Treasures Located in BC. Described as Treasure Book #1, it’s “a brief look at 11 stories/legends of lost treasures and mines in BC.” First published, Jan. 1, 1970, a brief look is right—just 36 pages.

(It’s yours from Amazon for just 2.00, by the way.)

As for Lost Treasure in BC #3 which includes the Agnus MacVee story, I think that explains “Agnus” rather than Agnes. English was an acquired language for Larry Lazeo, whose spelling (or was it just his typing?) was atrocious. I’ve used Agnus and MacVee rather than Agnes McVee, but I’m convinced that both names are the product, of which there are others, of the Lazeo imagination and his inability to spell and/or type.

But there’s no denying that Laurence Lazeo really started something!

To say that the Agnus MacVee story has legs is an understatement. CTV did a film documentary on its Travel and Discovery series in 2006, it’s noted on a BC Government website, and author Sarah Leavitt wrote a graphic novel, Agnes, Murderess, “after obsessive and exhaustive investigation into the BC Archives and other historical records,” a few years ago. At least Sarah Leavitt can spell Agnes and she flat out identifies her book as fiction.

One of this story’s greatest appeals is its lost treasure angle, Agnus and her accomplices supposedly having amassed a fortune in cash, nuggets and gold dust from their victims, and the two caches of gold said to have been found.

**As for digging up facts—via definitive historical records—relating to the MacVee saga, historians haven’t been as lucky.**

Prince George Citizen writer Greg Joyce, who has researched the tale, wrote in “The Murdering Madame of 108 Mile House,” that he could find no written documents of ownership of the 108 Mile Hotel during the decade that the MacVees supposedly operated it. Nor could he find mention of missing persons, 1875-1885, in the region.

Before him, Maryanne Rutledge had also come up with a blank while researching police records in Kamloops, New Westminster and the Royal BC Archives, Victoria. No death certificates for either Agnus MacVee or Al Riley, either. Obviously, these should exist in police, jail and court records.

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Situated beside 108 Mile Lake on eight acres midway between 100 Mile House and Lac La Hache, 108 Mile House, is described as “originally a roadhouse serving prospectors and settlers of the Cariboo”. Now a museum, the Post House was built on its present location Highway 97 in 1892 from the lumber of the original 1867 hotel. Others of the 13 buildings have been relocated on what’s now an official Heritage Site.

The 160-foot-long barn, ca 1908, is the largest log structure of its kind surviving in Canada.

Visitors who’ve heard of Agnus MacVee must marvel that it once was “the perfect place in which to rob and kill unsuspecting miners returning from the rich diggings around Barkerville and Horsefly, their pokes loaded with gold...” And that kidnapped women were kept chained in the basement until Agnus could sell them as overnight companions, as long term wives, or as manual labour!

This brings us back to the doubts expressed by Maryanne Rutledge, Greg Joyce and others as to the MacVee saga’s authenticity. Using 1885 as their starting point, waymarking.com did some digging of their own in the UBC newspaper collection of 167 old newspapers. After researching the names of the key players and finding “zero references” to any murders, they concluded: “What we have here is a classic example of an ‘Urban Myth’...”

Oh, Agnus!

Or should I say, Oh, Larry! How utterly disappointing!