Dead Ends (10 page)

It was just a matter of time before the law could no longer turn a blind eye.

That time came in early December 1879. Rancher William Palmer was riding the hills looking for a big black horse—gelding or stallion, the accounts vary—that had been missing for several days.

Palmer found the horse. But seventeen-year-old Charlie McLean, with his teen's thin moustache, was riding it, surrounded by his armed brothers and Alex Hare.

Palmer wisely pretended not to recognize his horse, took care to give no offence, and rode to Kamloops to report the theft to Ussher.

Ussher set out to bring the McLean gang in to face the charges. He didn't expect trouble—just two men came with him on December 7, Amni Shumway, as a guide, and Palmer. John McLeod, a rancher they met on the way, agreed to join them.

Early the next day, the small posse came upon the McLeans' camp near Long Lake, about twenty-five kilometres south of Kamloops. The boys had been drinking, other people's alcohol, of course. And not a good thing.

Ussher knew the McLeans. He had dealt with them before and thought they had a relationship. He expected them to come back to Kamloops, not happily, perhaps, but peacefully. For all their threats and brawling, they had never killed anyone.

It wasn't to be. As the four men approached the camp, someone fired. It was no warning shot. The bullet hit McLeod in the cheek, wounding him. Ussher was either very brave, very foolish, or just very wrong. He walked toward the camp empty-handed, calling on the McLeans to surrender.

Alex Hare attacked him first, rushing forward with gun in one hand, knife in the other, stabbing and slashing Ussher as they struggled. Archie—just fifteen—ended the fight, shooting Ussher in the head at close range. The gunfire continued wildly from both sides for several minutes. Allan McLean was wounded, not seriously, before the three remaining members of the posse retreated, leaving Ussher's body in the snow.

The Wild McLeans had crossed a line. They took Ussher's coat and boots and guns and handcuffs and started riding south. They stole guns and food and threatened lives along the way. They killed a shepherd named James Kelly near Stump Lake, for no apparent reason.

You couldn't say they had a real plan. But Allan had married a Native woman from the Nicola Valley. He hoped that, with their haul of guns and ammunition, the McLeans could encourage the Nicola to rise up against the colonists, providing them with protection at the same time.

It didn't work. Nicola chiefs weren't interested. The McLeans were only half Native and had made few friends—Charlie had bitten off the nose of a Native man in a fight.

But back in Kamloops, the threat of an uprising, once again, seemed real. The Colony of British Columbia's 1870 census only counted non-Natives, and found a total population of 10,580. The Native population was estimated to be at least 25,000.

There were fewer than 500 people in Kamloops, still a village of squat wood-frame buildings along the Thompson River.
But a posse of about seventy men quickly formed, armed with rifles and shotguns and revolvers, and set out for the Nicola Valley to bring the McLeans to justice.

The sixty-kilometre ride was hard in the December snow, but by December 9, the posse had trapped the Wild McLeans in a rough cabin at Douglas Lake. The standoff lasted four days, with occasional shots fired on both sides.

The McLeans refused to surrender, vowed to die first. The posse camped in the snow and cold, determined to wait them out.

But their patience wore thin. The posse tried to burn the McLeans out, piling oil-soaked hay bales around the cabin, but the sodden bales wouldn't light.

What threats couldn't accomplish, hunger and thirst did. On December 13, after four days, the McLeans and Hare surrendered and were taken to Kamloops, then on to the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster, a grim stone structure barely a year old.

On March 13, 1880, judge Henry Crease began their trial. Crease reminded the jury that the McLeans had a hard life, young men of mixed race with no father, cast out by both Native and white societies.

None of that mattered. A week later they were sentenced to hang. An appeal brought a second trial, and the same verdict.

The McLeans lived through one more Christmas—by all accounts troublesome and rebellious prisoners to the end, plotting escapes up to the last moment.

But in the last week of January, 1881, prison workers began building the gallows. On January 31, the three brothers and Alex Hare were hung together.

Allan McLean's son, George, was left to live with his mother and the Nicola Valley Natives, fatherless like Allan before him. He chose the discipline of a military life.

George was at Vimy Ridge in 1917. He captured nineteen German soldiers and killed five more who were trying to reach a machine gun, winning the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

George returned to a hero's welcome in Kamloops that October, with cheering crowds greeting his train. He stepped down from the railcar just a few hundred yards from where the posse rallied to hunt down his father.

I
t was a Sunday morning in January, still dark at 7:00 a.m.

Marguerite Telesford pulled on a pair of red sweatpants, black leg warmers, and a baggy sweatshirt. She grabbed her earmuffs—it was cold and drizzling—and went out for her regular run.

And vanished.

Telesford was athletic, tall, and slender, a twenty-year-old former track athlete and gymnast. She ran every other day, despite her busy life—studying to be a teacher, working part-time in a greeting card store, volunteering to help handicapped children.

She lived in Saanich, the largest of Greater Victoria's patchwork of municipalities. Her regular route offered a beautiful run along a quiet road through the rural Blenkinsop Valley, then back through Mount Douglas Park under towering trees.

But on January 18, 1987, she never came home.

Telesford still lived with Norma and Bill Cowell, the foster parents who took her in at fifteen. Telesford's family had migrated from Tobago; when her parents' marriage split up, she and her mother moved to Victoria. But her mother, poor and unwell, had to give up custody. The Cowells had become family.

Norma Cowell heard Telesford set out on her run, and kept listening for her return. As time passed, she grew more concerned. She called Saanich police.

She was right to be worried. Two other joggers had already spotted what looked like blood and a pair of broken earmuffs
on a quiet stretch of Telesford's route. Houses there were set back from the road, which was lined with trees and brush.

Police confirmed that the stains were blood. Their search of the area found a shotgun shell and a pry bar. A hair on the earmuffs appeared to be from a black person. Marguerite was black. Neighbours reported hearing shots that morning—not uncommon as hunters targeted deer in the valley. But ominous that day.

Police and friends searched the route. A helicopter hunted from the air, while police went door-to-door, and dogs and officers with thermal-imaging scanners hunted for any sign of Telesford. At dawn Wednesday, 250 volunteers turned up to do a shoulder-to-shoulder search of rugged Mount Douglas Park—and found nothing.

As winter turned into spring, the trail appeared to have gone cold. Rewards for information climbed to more than $10,000. Police conducted more than 2,500 interviews. Desperate, they even brought in a seventy-four-year-old man who had used his “dowsing stick” to find a missing hunter in the Kootenay region. Saanich police periodically appealed for help through the spring and early summer.

But in fact, officers had targeted a prime suspect by late February. One who wasn't going anywhere. Scott MacKay, a twenty-four-year-old roofer, was locked up in the Wilkinson Road provincial jail just five kilometres from the murder scene.

MacKay had been arrested February 18, caught by police in the act of assaulting a young black woman on an Oak Bay beach. He was already facing charges for unlawfully confining a woman in January 1986 and a vicious sexual assault ten months later. But at a November 29 bail hearing on the initial sexual assault charge, Crown prosecutors failed to oppose his release.

Wilkie, as it was known in crime circles, was a foreboding brick building more than seventy years old, with a mix of offenders serving sentences of less than two years and prisoners awaiting trial. It was crowded and noisy and prisoners had little to do. So they talked and gossiped and plotted.

Soon they started to gossip about MacKay. And police got their first break in a case that was increasingly looking impossible to solve.

On February 27, a Crime Stoppers' staffer called Saanich police. A Wilkie inmate had reported MacKay was involved in Telesford's murder. The same morning, Oak Bay Police Sgt. Harold McNeill got a call from a guard who said an inmate told him MacKay was talking about the murder and saying he needed to get rid of his truck. MacKay hated blacks, the informant added.

But the police had a problem. The Oak Bay police had already searched the truck, found nothing, and released it. McNeill met with two senior officers at the Saanich Police Department. They agreed they didn't have enough information to get a legal search warrant. So they decided to gamble, seize the truck anyway, and hope any evidence would be admissible in court.

They towed the truck from MacKay's girlfriend's house to the Oak Bay police compound. It sat there for four days, until a corporal from the Saanich crime scene unit searched it. He found a blue pompom, the kind that might come from a ski hat, wedged underneath the truck's frame. There was a single hair on the pompom, which analysis found was “similar” to hair from Telesford's comb.

It wasn't much. Telesford's foster father, Bill Cowell, said the pompom looked something like one attached to a toque in a box of winter clothes kept in a hallway closet in their home. It was now missing. But he had never seen Marguerite wear it. He hadn't seen anyone wear it in the last year.

But behind the tall fences and razor wire at the Wilkie jail, developments were unfolding in the favour of the police.

MacKay wasn't popular. And Danny Cain, a thirty-one-year-old career criminal who headed the inmate committee, had a particular dislike for MacKay, who had viciously raped a friend. Cain had spent most of his life in jail and accepted the code that treated sex offenders as the lowest of the low.

He developed a plan to befriend MacKay, get him to talk about the crime, and then turn him in. Other inmates had similar ideas, some encouraged by Cain.

Their testimony would be critical at the trial to come.

Police could find no more physical evidence. By April 1988, sixteen months after the disappearance, prosecutors decided they were ready to try for a conviction.

On April 20, officers showed up at Kent Maximum Security Penitentiary, where MacKay was serving a twelve-year term for the earlier sexual assault, and told him he was charged with murdering Marguerite Telesford. During the five-hour drive and ferry ride to Victoria, officers questioned him. He denied knowing anything about Telesford's disappearance.

Crown prosecutor Dennis Murray had a tough case. There was no body. The only physical evidence was the pompom, a hair, a shotgun shell, and a pry bar. No eyewitnesses, just second-hand testimony from other criminals. No
DNA
results. No fingerprints. No motive.

But on January 18, 1989, two years to the day since Marguerite Telesford had vanished, the Crown set out to create a vivid picture of the crime for the Victoria jury.

The trial unfolded over two weeks. Witnesses told about the pompom with a single hair found trapped on the underside of MacKay's truck. An expert said the hair was from a black person and “similar” to a hair on Telesford's brush.

Defence lawyer Gary Kinar established that police had searched the truck previously and found nothing, and that there was no other evidence—no blood, no fibres, no damage—even though the prosecutors claimed MacKay had run Telesford down, shot her, and then driven away with her body.

The Crown's case rested on the testimony of Danny Cain and four other inmates called to testify that MacKay had, in one way or another, admitted killing Telesford. Cain, a career criminal serving a term for armed robbery, testified in handcuffs. He was considered a dangerous man. He acknowledged being a “rat” was frowned on in prison, but said it was the right thing to do in this case.

But the inmate witnesses weren't just motivated by a sense of right and wrong. The jury heard that prosecutors had agreed to drop drug trafficking and fraud charges against Cain's wife in return for his testimony.

But the prosecutors failed to disclose that the inmates had all received relocation expenses in return for their testimony, or that they had agreed to Cain's request to be transferred from Wilkie. Two other inmates testified for the defence, saying Cain had set out to frame MacKay.

And MacKay took the stand, serious in dark-rimmed glasses, grey pants, and a brown tweed jacket. I didn't do it, MacKay insisted, saying he was being framed.

Prosecutor Dennis Murray painted a vivid picture in his closing address. “What happened here was an execution,” he told the jury. MacKay accosted Telesford. He knocked her down with his truck, then drove over her. She tried to crawl away, and MacKay got out of his truck and hit her with the iron bar found at the scene and shot her twice.

It was vivid, and damning, even if there was no evidence to support the theory. And after fifteen hours of deliberation, the jury found MacKay guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.

On appeal, the conviction on first-degree murder was overturned, with the court ruling there was no evidence that showed planning or premeditation as the Crown had claimed. MacKay's life sentence was unchanged, but the court ruled he could be eligible for parole in fifteen years.