Dead Ends (23 page)

But he had influence, and took his concerns to Vancouver's United Council of Scottish Societies. The council—politically powerful given the province's large Scottish population—successfully pressed for a new investigation.

The results were sensational. British Columbia Provincial Police Inspector Forbes Cruickshank quickly concluded Smith had been murdered and her body arranged to fake a suicide. There were no powder burns on her face, he noted, suggesting the gun had been fired from several feet away. Smith had no obvious way even to have the gun.

The fastest way to crack the case was to get answers from Wong, Cruickshank decided—whatever that would take. The police couldn't be directly involved in kidnapping, so he hired a private detective to snatch Wong on his weekly visit to Chinatown. Cruickshank was there for the questioning—and beatings—that lasted hours. Wong's story didn't change.

The police were getting nowhere. Public outrage was growing.

In late August, Attorney General Alexander Manson, pushed by the Scottish Societies, ordered a second inquest. Smith's body was exhumed.

The inquest was a sensation. Crowds pushed and scuffled with police to try to claim seats. A string of witnesses offered dramatic and contradictory evidence.

The largest crowd—some 1,500 people—showed up to try and claim a seat when Wong testified. Chinese witnesses did not usually take the normal oath to tell the truth on the witness stand.

But Alex Henderson, lawyer for the Scottish Societies, demanded Wong go through a bizarre swearing-in ritual that involved chopping the head off a chicken. He simply repeated the evidence he had already given.

On September 6, after five days of hearings, the jury delivered its verdict.

Janet Smith had been murdered.

The killer remained unknown. Rumours swirled about a wild party. About drug deals. (Baker's company dealt, legally, in opium and other drugs.)

And about Wong. One of Smith's fellow servants had testified she feared Wong. But her diaries said nothing of that, and noted he had given her presents, including a silk nightgown.

Evidence or not, racism and hysteria were rampant. The
Vancouver Star
called for greater protection for servants like Smith. “No young and pretty girl should be left alone and unprotected in a house with a Chinaman,” it said. “It is against all rules of decency and safety.” Vancouver
MLA
Mary Ellen Smith introduced a bill that would prevent white women from working in a home if there were Chinese servants. It failed to pass.

The unsolved case was an embarrassment. And on March 20, 1925, eight months after the murder, Wong was kidnapped once again, this time by police agents wearing white Ku Klux Klan hoods. He was held for six weeks in a Vancouver house, tortured and threatened. But he never changed his story.

On June 1, the kidnappers released Wong on a street where other Point Grey officers were waiting to arrest him for murder. (The kidnappers, it was later revealed, included Point Grey Police Department officers and officials from the Scottish Societies. Manson, the Attorney General, knew where Wong was being held but didn't act to free him.)

The charge was a sham. There was no evidence against Wong. The authorities hoped he might be holding back some information and would talk if threatened with a murder conviction and the death penalty.

But it didn't work. A grand jury dismissed the charge against Wong before it even went to trial.

Wong went back to working as a servant for the Bakers for a year, then returned to China. Frederick Baker continued as a member of Vancouver society.

And Janet Smith's murder remains a mystery.

R
obert Dziekanski died on the polished floor of Vancouver's airport just after 1:00 a.m. on October 14, 2007, in front of a small and horrified audience.

Four
RCMP
officers had tasered him repeatedly, even as he lay on the ground.

When he stopped breathing, they stood around and waited for paramedics. None of the Mounties started
CPR
, or provided any assistance.

Dziekanski had arrived in the airport about ten hours earlier, ready to start a new life in Canada. His mother, Zofia, had worked two jobs in Kamloops to save enough money to bring her forty-year-old son to Canada from Poland. She was there at the airport to meet him.

But his flight was two hours late. He spoke no English, and had great difficulty clearing Immigration and finding his way through the airport. No one helped him as he wandered the arrivals hall.

No one helped Zofia either. She was told Robert wasn't in the airport. By 10:00 p.m., after waiting nine hours, she left.

Robert was frustrated, angry, and exhausted. He had travelled for nineteen hours and spent another nine hours trapped in the airport. He finally cleared Immigration at 12:45 a.m. But he still had no idea where to go.

And his frustration boiled over. Dziekanski was a big man. He had worked in construction and as a miner. He paced around, pushed a computer to the floor, and toppled a small table. Someone called for help.

So four
RCMP
officers—constables Gerry Rundel, Bill Bently, and Kwesi Millington, and supervisor Cpl. Benjamin Robinson—headed to the scene.

They didn't discuss any plan to deal with Dziekanski on the way to the terminal from their nearby detachment. They didn't try to find a translator. They didn't try to de-escalate what was a tense situation.

Instead, the four
RCMP
officers marched up to the immigrant. Stand against the counter, they ordered, and place your hands on top. And, although he didn't understand the words, Dziekanski moved to the counter, where he picked up a stapler.

About twenty-five seconds had passed since the Mounties arrived at the scene. Robinson ordered an attack with the taser, a device that delivers a 50,000-volt electric shock. Millington tasered Dziekanski, who immediately collapsed to the floor and went into convulsions. The four officers jumped on top of him and tasered him four more times. He stopped breathing.

The officers climbed off him and stood around for fifteen minutes, until paramedics arrived.

Dziekanski was alive, and had done nothing seriously wrong. He needed a skilled customer service representative, if anything.

Then four Mounties arrived, and in minutes he was dead.

But that's not what the
RCMP
told the public. Dziekanski, an
RCMP
spokesman said, pushed over his luggage cart and began screaming, pounding on windows, and throwing chairs and a computer to the ground.

That was not true.

Three
RCMP
officers working at the airport tried to calm him down, the
RCMP
told the media. “They couldn't make any rhyme or reason as to what he was doing,” said
RCMP
Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre. “He kept yelling in what appeared to be a language from Eastern Europe.”

That was not true.

“Unfortunately he didn't calm down. He kept being very aggravated. He grabbed an object off the desk, we're not sure what it was, and he continued to yell.”

That was not true.

After the Mounties tasered Dziekanski, Lemaitre said, “He fell to the ground immediately although he continued to be very physically combative.” It took three officers to hold hold him down as he was handcuffed, the
RCMP
claimed. “He continued to fight after that, still kicking and flailing and then lapsed into unconsciousness.”

Untrue.

“We monitored his vital signs until medical emergency personnel could arrive.”

Untrue.

Dziekanski was sweating profusely and violent, which could indicate either drug use or a medical condition, Lemaitre added.

But he wasn't violent. And might have just been hot and exhausted.

It was a long list of falsehoods. None of it was true.

And it might have gone uncontradicted.

But Paul Pritchard of Nanaimo, another traveller, was in the airport with his video camera. He captured the entire event.

Pritchard gave his camera and the memory chip to the
RCMP
that night to help with the investigation. They promised everything would be returned within forty-eight hours.

Pritchard got the camera back. Not the video. Evidence, the
RCMP
said. We will keep it as long as we want, maybe forever.

But Pritchard was troubled by the
RCMP
'
S
false story and cover-up. He hired a lawyer, threatened to go to court, and got his video back.

On November 14, one month after Dziekanski was killed, Pritchard released the video to the media. And it showed that the official
RCMP
version of what had happened was untrue, a self-serving and utterly false series of fabrications.

Dziekanski wasn't resisting. The officers didn't try to talk to him. They tasered him repeatedly, crashed onto him, and killed him.

The video forced a reluctant British Columbia government to order an independent inquiry.

On June 18, 2010, the Braidwood Inquiry delivered its findings.

The
RCMP
was not justified in tasering Dziekanski. The four officers lied to investigators. The
RCMP
provided false accounts of the events, and failed to correct them even when it was clear they were false.

Too late for Robert Dziekanski, the burly Pole. He had been brutally killed.

Too late, of course, for his mother, Zofia.

And, for many Canadians, too late for the reputation of the
RCMP
.

JUROR
GANGSTER

N
o surprise that Peter Gill was partying at the Pelican Bay disco on Granville Island.

Gill had every reason to celebrate. One week earlier, he had walked out of court a free man, beating two first-degree murder charges laid after the Dosanjh brothers were gunned down in a running Vancouver drug turf war.

It was an unexpected win for Gill and five “associates.” A headline summed up the reaction to the jury verdict—“Dosanjh slayings acquittals stun police.”

And no surprise that Gill chose Pelican Bay, or “Bay of Pigs” as it was unkindly known, a rough-and-ready hangout for Vancouver's high-profile gangsters in 1995.

But his date for the evening, she was a very big surprise.

An off-duty
RCMP
officer in the bar recognized the lavishly made-up, dramatically dressed blonde hugging and dancing with Gill.

It was Gillian Guess, a.k.a. “Elvira” or the “Dragon Lady.” And Guess had spent the last eight months on the jury that decided Gill and company weren't guilty. Jurors and defendants aren't supposed to cuddle in clubs.

Police were already suspicious about Guess. An anonymous call to Crime Stoppers had alleged she was sleeping with Gill while she was on the jury.

Jurors in Canadian trials are generally quiet participants, anonymous and sworn to eternal secrecy.

Everyone noticed Guess. She sat in the front row of the jury box, in tight miniskirts or designer jeans and, some days,
see-through blouses. High heels, bright red lipstick, big eyelashes, and blonde hair often piled up to the sky. She had a striking resemblance to Patsy, the pouty-lipped, heavily made-up character from the British sitcom
Absolutely Fabulous
.

“Dramatic,” Spencer Charest called her. Charest was a court reporter who hunched over a tiny keyboard, recording every word of the testimony. It took fierce concentration. But he noticed Guess.

Dramatic was a good word for the trial, too.

By 1994, the battle for Vancouver's hugely profitable drug trade had broken into open warfare. It was an ultra-violent, paranoid, highly armed world. The gangsters were a new breed, many from the Indo-Canadian and Asian communities. They shared a style—close-cropped hair, flashy jewelry, expensive clothes, goatees, and muscles that came from hours at the gym. They rode in customized cars with bulletproof armour and hidden gun compartments. They flaunted their gangster status, taunted police with their boldness, and lived in a world of violence and betrayal.