Dead Ends (16 page)

The colonial government posted a $250 reward for anyone who shared information or brought in the three crew members, a sizeable sum in 1864 even during a gold rush. Colonial officials enlisted Russian and American help to find the
Random
and its rogue crew.

U.S. officers stationed on San Juan Island, about thirty kilometres from Victoria, seized the sloop at anchor at nearby Orcas Island. But the three crew members escaped into the bush and were never apprehended.

“I am not much surprised at this,” Frederick Seymour, the newly appointed governor of the Colony of British Columbia reported in a dispatch to London. “The feeling of the majority of the population in the adjoining territory would be strongly opposed to the surrendering to British justice [of] American citizens who had merely shot Indians who were interfering, (though on behalf of the law) with the traffic carried on by the white men.”

Seymour reported to Edward Cardwell, the British secretary of state for colonies, that he had accepted Duncan's proposals on measures “to pacify the Indians at Metlakahtla.” A surgeon and nurses were sent up to care for the wounded men, and Onslow's widow received twenty pounds compensation.

And the incident was forgotten for almost 150 years — until 2002, when a Victoria Police Department constable with an interest in history stumbled on an account of the crime. Jonathan Sheldan dug into the case, checking old newspapers and reports. With help, he learned the details.

And he realized Cst. Reuben (Cowallah/Cowaltah) Onslow was the first Native police officer to be killed in the line of duty in what was to become British Columbia, and perhaps in Canada.

In 2007, Onslow's name was carved into the monument to fallen peace officers outside the legislative building in Victoria.

G
ilbert Bland was well named. He was forgettable. Average.

Mid-forties, about five feet nine inches, 160 to 170 pounds, with a moustache and sandy-coloured hair, reddish in some lights.

He dressed in the slightly rumpled uniform of the invisible middle-aged man—khaki slacks, a tweed jacket or blazer, dress shirt.

And with a briefcase, a razor blade, and a vaguely reassuring air, he robbed libraries, museums, and archives across North America of priceless treasures.

He didn't need a gun. Just a polite smile, and nerve. And collectors who didn't ask too many questions when Bland offered them that prized rare map they had been hunting.

Bland had a bumpy life, with a series of early run-ins with the law. After an elaborate scam to create a bunch of fake identities and claim unemployment benefits landed him in a federal prison in Oklahoma, it looked like he was going legit. He and his wife started a company, and Bland made it through the 1980s without getting into more trouble.

Then, one day in the early '90s, Bland bid on the contents of an abandoned storage locker, hoping to find something of value to sell. Sorting through someone's forgotten treasures, he came across a stash of old maps. And he quickly learned they could be worth real money.

Bland and his wife needed money. Their business was failing, and they had big debts and little income. Bland was forty-six, young enough to start again.

Maybe maps were the answer.

And in 1994, they moved to Coral Springs, Florida, and opened Antique Maps and Collectibles in a strip mall. It was an unlikely location, but that didn't matter. Bland did business over the Internet, sending out lists of maps for sale and taking inquiries from collectors.

His timing was good. Map collectors had always been fervent, obsessive even. But soaring values brought new buyers, almost as keen and a lot less knowledgeable.

Still, Bland was a newcomer, with few connections and little experience. A few collectors who talked to him were surprised that he didn't seem to know that much about maps. His prices were too low.

But he had an inexplicable ability to get his hands on specific antique maps as soon as people asked him about them.

Bland had found a shortcut, and a great way to increase profit. He just stole the maps he needed.

That's how he came to the door of the British Columbia Archives on October 5, 1995, a greyish fall day. The archives, beside the Royal British Columbia Museum and across the street from Rattenbury's grey stone legislative building, welcomed researchers.

Bland signed in under the alias of James Perry, and signed out nine rare books to use in his “research.”

And as he leafed through them, he paused at particularly marketable maps and sliced them out, sliding twenty into his briefcase. He walked out with one of the earliest maps of the Pacific Rim and pages from a 1601 edition of
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
, the first world atlas.

The maps were a dealer's bread and butter. Rare and desirable, but not so rare that too many questions would be asked. Maps from the
Theatrum
, for example, would likely retail at $500 to $1,000. Bland's haul would bring him $10,000 to $20,000 for a few hours' work.

The next day Bland paid a visit to the University of British Columbia Library's special collections, and left with another nineteen maps.

The institutions—like many before them—didn't even know they had been robbed.

Libraries and archives were easy pickings. Staff were trusting, and the institutions hadn't recognized that the soaring value of maps would attract criminals. A 1482 edition of Ptolemy's map book
Geographia
could be bought for $5,000 in 1950. In 2009, a copy sold for more than $1 million.

When Bland was caught, it was by a library user, not staff. She spotted him in Baltimore's spectacular George Peabody Library on December 7, 1995, two months after his British Columbia visit.

Bland was acting oddly. The researcher wasn't sure, but she thought she saw him take a map from an old book. She alerted library staff as Bland left the library. There was a bizarre half-walking, half-jogging chase. Library security staff weren't really sure about tackling a middle-aged researcher. Bland tossed a notebook into some bushes before the guards persuaded him to return to the library.

When they checked the notebook, staff found three maps—more than two centuries old—tucked into the pages.

Bland was smooth. He apologized, offered to pay the library $700 cash, on the spot, for damaging the book. They accepted the offer. No one called police.

It was a huge mistake. When the library's security director took time to go through the notebook, he found a shopping list—Bland had written down desirable maps, and the institutions where he could steal them.

But the Peabody quickly redeemed itself, alerting other institutions to Bland's agenda and pseudonym. Ultimately, nineteen libraries and archives found they had been visited by Bland, as James Perry. When they checked the books he had signed out, maps were missing.

The British Columbia Archives and the University of British Columbia were among the victims.

“I got physically ill,” recalled Gary Mitchell, then the deputy provincial archivist. “For my colleagues and I, it was just awful. It felt like we had suffered a death in the family.”

Bland had come and gone without a trace. “No one noticed him at all,” Mitchell said. “No one recalls him.”

It was the same at all the other libraries.

Bland knew he was busted, that the
FBI
would soon be on his trail.

He didn't panic. He planned. He emptied the Florida store, locked the door, and left a hand-lettered note saying it was closed. He hid his trove of stolen maps. They were, he realized, his best bargaining chip. And he judged, rightly, that prosecutors would not know what to make of his thefts, and juries might not think the crimes serious.

On January 2, 1996, a month after his bad luck in Baltimore, Bland's preparations were complete. He turned himself in.

Bland and his lawyer offered the prosecutors a deal. Accept a plea bargain, and a short jail sentence, and Bland would tell them how to get the stolen maps—or some of them—back. Or take a chance on trials and losing the maps forever.

It worked. Bland pleaded guilty and pointed police to a Florida storage locker with 150 maps, then told them where to find additional maps that he had already sold to other dealers.

The British Columbia Archives flew an expert down to the
FBI
lab in Quantico, Virginia, and recovered 18 of its 20 stolen maps.
UBC
, unhappily, did less well, retrieving only five of 19 stolen maps.

And Bland—the man no one could remember—served less than seventeen months in jail and was free once again.

R
oy Spencer scrimped and sacrificed to push his twin sons, Brian and Byron, toward the
NHL
. He stood outside night after night in the bitter cold and flooded a rink outside their log cabin in Fort St. John. He taught them the game, drilled them at the dinner table.

But when the moment came—when Brian made the big time—things went terribly, fatally wrong.

Fort St. John was a hard town, the kind of place that turns out tough hockey players who make it to the pros. It was an eighteen-hour drive to Vancouver, and the town of 7,000 was farther north than parts of Alaska. The winters were long and cold.

And Roy Spencer was a hard man. He was a mechanic who worked hard, drank hard, and pushed his sons hard.

In 1949, when Brian and Byron were born, northern British Columbia was still the frontier, a place where most people made their own way and weren't much keen on being told what to do.

Roy Spencer was one of those people. And he pushed the same values on his boys.

Brian took to the pressure. He excelled at hockey, and showed some of his father's aptitude for both drinking and toughness.

Toughness was important. In 1970, there were fourteen
NHL
teams, and about 160 jobs for forwards like Brian Spencer. There were 15,000 kids playing minor hockey in British Columbia alone, most with at least vague dreams of the
NHL
. Scouts wanted to see players willing to endure anything to win.

Brian, after his father's schooling, had a chance. At sixteen, he left home—and quit school—to play for the Estevan Bruins in Saskatchewan. Over the next three years, he played in Calgary, Regina, back in Estevan, and then with the Swift Current Broncos. No one considered it strange that a teen, far from home, could be called into the rink and be told he had been traded and needed to get on the Greyhound to meet his new owners.

Spencer didn't care. He was driven. And back home, his dad was watching, counting on him.

He figured out how to get noticed. In his last year in junior, he racked up almost a point a game and got even tougher, tripling the amount of time he spent in the penalty box.

“Spinner,” they called him, because of his frenetic, crashing play. The nickname stuck. A good-looking, tough kid.

It worked. Scouts for the Toronto Maple Leafs took notice, and Spencer was the fifty-fifth player picked in the draft. Not a top prospect—only eighty-five players were drafted. But it meant the Leafs wanted him. Those hours in the backyard rink with frozen toes, the long bus rides across the Prairies, all that pressure from his dad. All worth it.

Spencer couldn't stick with the Maple Leafs in his first training camp in 1969, and was sent down to the Tulsa Oilers, a farm team in the rough Central League. He scored thirteen goals, and spent 186 minutes in the penalty box—the most on the team. He didn't back down from fights, even if at under six feet, some 180 pounds, he was small for a fighter.

His father was proud, but still pushing Brian to try harder, make the
NHL
.

And Brian got the call in December 1970. Get to Toronto. You'll be playing for the Maple Leafs. Darryl Sittler, Bobby Baun, Paul Henderson, Jacques Plante, Dave Keon. And Brian Spencer.

It was a great week. Spencer played well in the Leafs' 4-0 win over rival Montreal on Wednesday. On Thursday, he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter in Tulsa.

And his dad was going to get a chance to watch him play on
Hockey Night in Canada
on Saturday night. Spencer had
even been chosen to be the sweaty player interviewed between periods by the
CBC
.

Roy Spencer got ready. He bought a new television antenna to make sure he pulled in the signal from the
CBC
station in Prince George. He invited friends to come over, laid in party supplies. The Leafs versus the Chicago Blackhawks. His boy facing off against superstar Bobby Hull. It was the dream.

Almost. The Vancouver Canucks had joined the
NHL
that year.
CBC
brass decided to broadcast the hapless Canucks versus the Oakland Golden Seals, a team distinguished by their white skates, in British Columbia.

Roy Spencer exploded when he got the news. He phoned the Prince George
CBC
station and yelled at a news staffer, threatening to come to the station.

And he did. Grabbing a couple of guns—and, according to some accounts, a bottle of rye whiskey—he set out on the two-hour drive to Prince George.

Around 7:30 p.m., Spencer pulled into the dark parking lot and encountered news anchor Tim Haertel. He stuck his 9mm handgun in Haertel's back. It looked “50 feet around” to the newsman. “He had the hammer pulled back and he said he was going to use it.”

Things just got worse. Spencer ended up with eight staff lined up at gunpoint. “I don't want to kill anybody. I've killed before.”

“If I can't watch my son play hockey tonight, nobody gets to watch hockey tonight.”

Spencer was “cold sober, but shaking like a leaf,” said program director Dan Prentice. When Spencer told him to take the station off the air, he did.

The
CBC
went dark across northern British Columbia.

But a radio station shared the offices. An announcer knew something was wrong and called the
RCMP
.