Even though he’s been dead for almost a century, one of British Columbia’s most infamous con men is back in the news. dward Arthur Wilson, aka Brother XII, may be long gone but the legends of the religious cult he founded at Cedar-by-the-Sea (Cedar) and on DeCourcy and Cortez Islands in the 1920s live on.
I’ve never understood the human fascination with crime but there’s no denying its universal appeal. Crime stories, particularly those about true murders, unsolved and otherwise, are the subject of movies, plays, books, magazines and websites; they’re on television and radio, and among the headliners of daily newscasts.
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One of the joys of publishing what really amounts to an online magazine is that it often draws a response from readers, usually as brief comments but, sometimes, something much more ambitious.
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Back in 2007 the Nanaimo Star ran a look-back piece on the city’s ‘Costco Caper’ robbery of Mar. 7, 1996.
This was a rather ingeniously planned heist of Loomis Armoured guards as they made a delivery of cash to Costco’s ATM machine. The lone robber escaped with seven cassettes of currency; the amount stolen has never been released to the public.
Cowichan’s legendary Tzouhalem is in the news again.
Not the Quamichan war chief himself—he’s been dead for well over a century—but the fact that he's going to be the subject of a movie.
Reporter Robert Barron recently reported in the Cowichan Valley Citizen that documentary filmmaker Harold C. Joe, a member of Cowichan Tribes, and a film crew are making a television documentary that will “examine the near-mythic figure of Chief Tzouhalem through interviews and creative re-enactments".
The operative word here is “creative” as the only existing written records that refer to Tzouhalem are the hand-me-downs of non-Indigenous (i.e. white) contemporaries (some of them in positions of authority and therefore adversarial).
I had no intention of following last week’s post on the Westwell’s tragedy with another tale of violent death by human hand.
And I wouldn’t want last week’s tale of a family tragedy brought on by mental illness to be equated with this week’s story—which is nothing less than a home-grown replay of the most infamous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper.
No, I must lay the blame on the ‘Visual Storytellers,’ an offshoot of the popular online nostalgic Facebook photo gallery, “You Know You’re From Duncan...” and their recent post about, of all sinister things, Duncan’s Holmes Creek.
The difference in journalistic style between a big city daily and a small town weekly newspaper couldn’t have been more different—even extreme.
The headline for the Mar. 26, 1949 edition of the Victoria Daily Colonist was wall-to-wall and set in type one and a-half inches high.
It’s the sort of headline that’s usually reserved for such extraordinary news events as wars, toppling governments, outrageous scandals and disasters.
I’ve already dealt with the subsequent careers, at least so far as can be determined at this late date, of three of the principals. By all indications banker A.D. Macdonald was financially ruined and had to work for a living for the rest of his life; clerk/bookkeeper Josiah Barnett whose subsequent release after his arrest on the vaguest of suspicion said it all; and Manager John Waddell who, within three years of the robbery popped up in Ontario as the owner of several sawmills and a yacht.
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So: who did rob Macdonald’s Bank in the early hours of September 23, 1864?
How did the thief or thieves know of the $30,000 in gold, silver and banknotes (the equivalent of $900,000 in today’s dollars) that was being kept overnight before shipment to the Cariboo in the morning?
The brazen theft had to have been planned, as evidenced by entry to the bank having been made by means of a ladder of the exact length required to descend from a skylight, and a key found on the floor that fit the safe lock.
“One of the last remaining links with Victoria’s perfect crime—a scandal that made headlines as far as San Francisco—has fallen to the wrecking crews of progress. A landmark for more than a century, imposing Springfield Manor of 633 Michigan Street, is being razed to make way for a 23-storey apartment building...”
Such was my lead-in, in March 1969, to the tragic story of Macdonald’s Bank and its mysterious robbery that has become one of Victoria’s most enduring legends.