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LITERARY LOCATION: North of Beaver Lake, Stanley Park
In 1953, the skeletons of two little boys were uncovered by a Vancouver Parks Board worker in the bushes of Stanley Park, not far from the entrance to Lions Gate Bridge. Both were likely killed about five years earlier. Eve Lazarus points out in her creepy, saddening and necessary book, Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders, that they were slain around the time seven-year-old Roddy Moore was inexplicably beaten to death on his way to school in East Vancouver in 1947.
The good news in Eve Lazarus' Cold Case Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp)--if there can be any good news in a book about unsolved murders--is that the homicide rate has been falling in Canada. Near the outset of the 21st century, murder accounted for 0.1 percent of all police-reported violent crime.
Vancouver was becoming safer than ever, with one of the lowest murder rates in North America. In 1962, Vancouver had eighteen murders with a population of less than 400,000; by 2013, the city's population had more than doubled and yet there were only six murders.
That disparity can be partially explained by demographics. The percentage of the population comprised of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five-the demographic that commits seventy-five percent of homicides in most countries-had dropped considerably since the 1970s.
In 2015, the VPD had 337 unsolved murders on its books dating back to 1970. Police will not comment about these crimes on the record, but Eve Lazarus examined twenty-four of the city's most baffling unsolved murders between 1944 and 1996 for Cold Case Vancouver.
As a populist historian, Lazarus developed a lively but authoritative tone in three previous B.C. heritage titles. For Cold Case Vancouver, Lazarus was more like a respectful reporter, avoiding sensationalism, as she relates the facts, without lurid or rumoured conjectures, adding maps, archival photos and newspaper clippings.
There's the case of the young country singer Debbie Roe, just back from success in Nashville, who was sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and left to drown in 1975 and also the first recorded gang murder in 1954 when Danny Brent was shot in the head, probably by hired killers from Montreal, and left on the tenth hole of the UBC golf course.
Sex rears its ugly head in numerous entries, including the case of an in-the-closet gay man, Robert Hopkins, who was found strangled and shot in the head in his home in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area. We learn from BC Gay and Lesbian archivist Ron Dutton that if a crime against a gay person ever did make it to court up until the 1980s, the "homosexual panic defence" was a standard tactic for defence lawyers. A defendant could claim he was so horrified to be propositioned by a gay person that extreme retaliation could be deemed acceptable by the court.
Conversely, when a man attacked thirty women in the early 1950s, he was dubbed "the love bandit" by the press. In that era, domestic violence was largely ignored and women were chronically at-risk in their homes.
"Certainly in the Fifties," says Neil Boyd, Director of SFU's School of Criminology, "it was totally permissible for mother and fathers to whack their children in the grocery store. Teachers would hit children, and the notion that a man could 'correct' his spouse was seen as totally acceptable."
Lazarus has not merely regurgitated stories from the likes of retired Vancouver Police staff sergeant, Joe Swan, who operated the Vancouver Police Centennial Museum and wrote an historical crime column for the West Ender newspaper commencing in 1983. His accounts of murder cases were reprinted in A Century of Service: Vancouver Police 1886-1986 (Vancouver Police Historical Society, 1986) and Police Beat: 24 Vancouver Murders (Vancouver: Cosmopolitan Publishing, 1991).
Instead Lazarus has consulted a wide range of informants and undertaken some original research, most strikingly in her introductory story about the grisly fate of twenty-four-year-old Jennie Conroy whose body was found near the West Vancouver cemetery in 1944.
A disturbing percentage of victims in Cold Case Vancouver are female; and we learn we are most at-risk to be murdered if we are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
"The truly frightening thing is," Lazarus writes, "is that these killers might still walk around among us. As a forensic expert for the Vancouver Police Department said, even with DNA and all the scientific improvements, 'we don't catch the smart ones.'"
It's common knowledge that Canuck Place in Shaughnessy was previously a mansion that served as the headquarters for a Vancouver chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, but there are many other addresses in the Lower Mainland with skeletons in their closets.
The Australian-born journalist and freelance writer Eve Lazarus of North Vancouver examined the social histories of heritage houses in Greater Vancouver for At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil 2007).
Lazarus followed with Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens: Tales from the Capital City (Anvil 2012). It received the 2015 City of Vancouver Heritage Award for a book that heightens awareness of the historic value of Vancouver's early neighbourhoods.
Lazarus returned to print with Sensational Vancouver (Anvil 2014). Including a walking tour map of Strathcona and Chinatown, Lazarus highlighted the famous and the infamous, particular the latter from the first half of the 20th century when 'Terminal City' was a hotbed for bookies, brothels and bootleggers. Lazarus makes the (disputed) claim that Canada's first female cop was Lurancy Harris who patrolled the houses of ill repute on Alexander Street. Opium dens and gambling joints were the purview of Detective Joe Ricci. Sensational Vancouver also celebrates remarkable women such as Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa-along with entertainers, artists and controversial characters.
Between 2004 and 2015, more than 10,000 demolition permits were issued for residential buildings in the city of Vancouver. As of 2015, an average of three houses a day were being torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to merit heritage protection, but Caroline Adderson and other Vancouver writers--including Eve Lazarus--believed the demoliton of these dwellings amounted to an architectural loss. Adderson spearheaded Vancouver Vanishes: Narratives of Demolition and Revival (Anvil 2015), co-authored with Eve Lazarus, John Atkin, Kerry Gold, Evelyn Lau, John Mackie, Elise & Stephen Partridge and Bren Simmers. The introduction is by heritage artist and activist Michael Kluckner--who had published a book called Vanishing Vancouver--and photographs are by Tracey Ayton and Adderson. Eve Lazarus "blogs obsessively about houses and their genealogies" at www.evelazarus.com/blog/
AWARDS:
Shorlisted for Bill Duthie booksellers' Choice Award in
2016 for Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
Heritage Award for Heritage Advocacy
2013 District of North Vancouver
City of Vancouver Book Award
2008 Finalist for At Home with History
Kenneth R. Wilson Awards
2007 Gold - best merchandizing/marketing article "Keep it Real," Marketing Magazine
2001 Gold - best merchandizing/marketing article "Sizing up the Sizzle," Marketing Magazine
BOOKS:
Frommer's with Kids Vancouver (Toronto: CDG Books, 2001)
At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil, 2007) $20 1895636802
The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue, 2009) $34.95 Co-authored by Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens (Anvil, 2012) $24 9781927380062
Sensational Vancouver (Anvil, 2014) $24 9781927380987
Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders (Arsenal, 2015) $21.95 9781551526294
Blood, Sweat, and Fear (Arsenal, 2017) $21.95 9781551526850
Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing True Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer (Arsenal 2018) $21.95 9781551527468
Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City's Hidden History (Arsenal 2020) $32.95 9781551528298
Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Sensational Murder & Missing Persons Cases (Arsenal, 2022) $22.95 9781551529073
[BCBW 2023]
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver's First Forensic
Investigator
by Eve Lazarus
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017.
$21.95 / 9781551526850
Reviewed by Bonnie Reilly Schmidt
*
In Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver's First Forensic Investigator Eve Lazarus rescues one of the most important actors in the history of forensic science in Canada from obscurity.
This book features the work of John F.C.B. Vance, a chemist originally hired as a city analyst for the City of Vancouver in 1907, who eventually achieved the rank of honorary police inspector as a forensic investigator with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).
For forty-two years, Vance was on the cutting edge of some of the most innovative advances in police forensics in North America, earning him headlines and an international reputation. His exceptional work went beyond blood type analysis; it extended to the examination of fingerprints, glass, gravel, clothing, guns, tire tracks, and even shoe polish from crime scenes resulting in the conviction, or exoneration, of hundreds of accused in criminal cases.
This book is not, however, a biography of Vance, a fact that Lazarus is up front about in her introduction. Readers may be disappointed with this approach, especially since Lazarus had access to Vance's family and their personal papers. We anticipate hearing more about J.F.C.B., as he was called by the family, particularly when we read that Lazarus discovered envelopes of police evidence such as hair samples, autopsy reports, and crime scene photographs in a box in the garage of one of Vance's grandchildren.
We do learn that Vance was a workaholic who rarely took vacations or spent weekends away from the office. He was also obsessed with inventing a machine that gave "human odour a physical form,"; much like a fingerprint, to "detect, capture, and record individual human smells"; from a crime scene. But little else is known about him as a person.
Instead, Vance's career serves as the backdrop in the book for the crimes he investigated. Lazarus adroitly selects some of Vancouver's most infamous crimes to highlight Vance's forensic abilities, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, arguably the apex of his career.
In addition to the materials provided by the Vance family, Lazarus relies on accounts from newspapers, the City of Vancouver archives, and the Vancouver Police Department's annual reports as her primary sources.
Lazarus writes in a highly readable style, demonstrating an ability to distill what was probably a tremendous amount of archival information into a narrative that does not overwhelm the reader with excessive detail. Her research is complimented by a number of interesting photographs, most contributed by the Vance family.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the description of the corruption that characterized the culture of the VPD during the last century. In some ways, the VPD was a progressive police force: it hired the first female police officers in Canada in 1912 and later Vance as a forensic scientist in 1914.
In other ways, the VPD was associated with corrupt police practices. In 1934, several attempts were made on Vance's life over a seven-month period. Although some of these attempts were thought to have been perpetrated by accused criminals trying to prevent Vance from testifying against them, his notebooks reveal that he also suspected jealous colleagues. Vance wrote that "the chief was behind the attacks . . . or at the very least knew who was,"; an important piece of Vancouver police history that would remain hidden if not for Lazarus's research.
By the time Vance retired in 1949, he had outlasted thirteen police chiefs and sixteen mayors. When he left his office for the last time, Vance took the files of two unsolved murders and his notebooks with him.
He also took the box of evidence that eventually made it into his grandchild's garage and Lazarus's hands, an act that proved pivotal in resurrecting Vance as one of Vancouver's most famous and accomplished civil servants.
*
Bonnie Reilly Schmidt worked as a police officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police between 1977 and 1987.
*
Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing True Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer
by Eve Lazarus
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018
$21.95 / 9781551527468
Reviewed by Larry Hannant
*
True crime "may be the dominant genre of our time," according to Globe and Mail media writer Simon Houpt. And little wonder. It's got much going for it. The inherent mystery of a fictive whodunit is bolstered by a factual foundation that gives both writer and reader plenty of detail to sink their teeth into.
Still, true crime puts a writer to the test. Since the events actually happened, an internet search will quickly yield the conclusion that the foul deed was done by the Plutocrat in the White House with a Tweet. Case closed.
So the true crime writer can't entice the reader down dead-end paths, dangle false clues, or introduce clearly-guilty suspects who turn out to be innocent.
So how's the beleaguered writer to hold the reader's attention?
The question was answered in 1752 by the great French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire: "My secret is to force the reader to wonder: Will Philip V ascend the throne?" As it turned out, Philip would, even if the prospect of a member of the French royal family taking power in Spain would provoke the War of the Spanish Succession that raged through Europe and spread carnage even into the Americas from 1700 to 1713. Consumed by suspense as they undoubtedly were, Voltaire's readers already knew the answer to the dilemma he posed.
Thus advised, successful true crime writers since the 18th century have crafted their words to make the inevitable seem uncertain.
Eve Lazarus takes on this task in Murder by Milkshake, an examination not just of a bizarre case of poisoning in mid-1960s Vancouver, but also of the gawky city in which it took place. The Vancouver Lazarus sketches was an unsophisticated adolescent whose beauty had not yet become iconic and for whom culture was still dangerous terrain. In 1962, for instance, the edgy U.S. comedian-social commentator Lenny Bruce performed once at Isy’s Supper Club. The redoubtable journalist Jack Wasserman attacked the show, and the city's licensing boss threatened to close the club. Bruce was sent packing.
Lazarus deftly weaves her main characters into this still-conservative social milieu. Rene Castellani was an ambitious radio personality with a flair for self-promotion who had reached the cusp of success after a chequered career repairing washing machines and managing out-of-the-way hotels. He was riding high in what was the heyday of the radio boom of the early 1960s at CKNW, which a news reporter described as "the most promotion-minded station you could imagine." He excelled at inventing on-air and street-level personas like Klatu from Outer Space and the Maharaja of Aleebaba who had credulous Vancouverites believing in alien invasions and Indian potentates intent on buying up British Columbia.
Esther Castellani, married to Rene since 1946, worked part time at a children's store, assumed most of the tasks to raise their young daughter, Jeannine, loved nothing more than a White Spot meal of a burger, fries and a milkshake, and repented for days on failed diets of cottage cheese.
Lolly Miller was a widow fifteen years younger than Esther who worked as a receptionist at CKNW. Her birth name was Adelaide, but "Lolly the Dolly" was the name that stuck at the radio station.
By 1964, rumours of an adulterous affair between the ebullient Rene and Lolly were rife, such that CKNW management warned them about the controversy. In May 1965, Lolly was fired over the issue, despite being the sole parent for her six-year-old son. Rene was spared, in part because his wife was already seriously ill, suffering a combination of ailments that baffled doctors.
Before the wide-ranging 1969 reform of the divorce, abortion, and birth control laws that gave Pierre Trudeau an early reputation as a progressive, the only grounds for divorce in Canada was adultery, and the divorce itself had to be by mutual consent. That agreement was not likely to occur between Rene and Esther.
Bring on more milkshakes, laced, as it turned out, with arsenic. But no one suspected that on 11 July 1965, when Esther died after more than six agonizing weeks at Vancouver General Hospital. Three days later, one day after Esther's funeral, Rene, Lolly and their two children drove off in the CKNW car for a holiday in Disneyland.
What killed the perfect crime was the dogged determination of Dr. Bernard Moscovitch, the internist who had cared for Esther. His persistence, augmented by two astute forensic specialists and diligent work by two Vancouver police detectives, produced the cause of death and, still under the kitchen sink at the Castellani home, the source of the arsenic, weed killer.
Rene was arrested, charged and convicted of murder. Sentenced to death, his punishment was commuted to life in prison less than two weeks before he was due to hang.
An experienced crime writer, Lazarus lays out the case in a capable fashion, although two lengthy chapters of background mean that the story doesn't begin to get some wind until page 40. And considering her list of five previous books of true crime and historical mysteries, her account of the trial of Rene comes across as lacking the element of suspense that Voltaire argued was essential. In a single paragraph of 75 words, for instance, she skims over the defence attorney's plea for acquittal, the jury's deliberations and guilty verdict, and the judge's imposition of the death penalty. What might have been played for drama comes across as matter of fact.
Having passed over the trial, Lazarus follows up with an extended assessment of the impact of the trauma on Jeannine Castellani, the couple's daughter. Understandably troubled by the loss of her mother and the realization of her father's crime and his ruthless manipulation of her, Jeannine struggled for years to address the carnage that consumed her youth.
This focus on the living victim could be especially appealing to women readers, who, again according to the Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt, make up 80 percent of the true crime audience. The focus on Jeannine also reveals a laudable effort to minimize the sense of exploitation that is felt by some survivors of actual crimes who are featured later in books and films.
As a social history, Murder by Milkshake gives us a portrait of a city still on the brink of finding itself, far from today's shimmering metropolis that's consistently among the top ten of the world's most livable cities. That snapshot of a city populated by ambitious, struggling people gives the book special merit.
*
A history professor and an award-winning book author and website contributor, Larry Hannant presents history in a variety of formats. He's the author or editor of three books, including The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art (1998), which won the Robert S. Kenny Prize in Left/Labour Studies. His forthcoming book is an edited collection titled Bucking Conservatism: Alternative Stories of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s (2019). The award-winning website Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History includes two sections from him. In addition to non-fiction, he's published poetry, creative non-fiction, short stories, and articles in a number of magazines and newspapers. He's an adjunct associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria.
*
Other reviews of the author's work by BC studies:
Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens
Sensational Vancouver
Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
++++++++++++++++++
Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History by Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp $32.95)
Chuck Davis would have loved and devoured Eve Lazarus’ Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.
This is not another predictable re-hash of stories and anecdotes gleaned from Davis, the city’s master gatherer who gave us The Vancouver Book (1976) and The Greater Vancouver Book (1997). Instead Lazarus has done her own sleuthing, aided and abetted by internet informants and generous peers such as John Atkin, Michael Kluckner and John Carter.
The result is a potpourri of forgotten art works, eccentric museums, oddball houses, dismantled architectural gems, and a belly-flop contest, as Lazarus explores Vancouver’s neighbourhoods with equal measures of humour and pathos.
Highlights include: Vancouver’s first horse race was held on a downtown street in 1887; Vancouverites drove on the left-hand side of the road until January 1, 1922—one of the last areas in Canada to change over; the rundown Regent Hotel in the Downtown Eastside was a ritzy place when it opened a century ago; Vancouver’s first hospital was located on West Pender Street between Cambie and Beatty; Canada’s first gas station opened at the corner of Cambie and Smithe in 1907 (when there were only 2,131 cars registered in the entire country); the VanTan Nudist Club, founded in 1939, is still operational; and stonemason Jimmy Cunningham who devoted 32 years of his life building the seawall, didn’t live to see it finished when he died in 1963.
Yes, there is, arguably, some filler material, and well-known figures like Trinidad-born Joe Fortes, Vancouver’s first official lifeguard. But even long-time Vancouver history buffs cannot fail to be impressed by Lazarus’ blend of the bizarre, the hidden, the destroyed and the over-looked.
Vancouver Exposed is exemplary popular history, so much so that it succeeds in being disturbing. It’s more proof that Vancouver, as captured by photographer Fred Herzog and celebrated by Chuck Davis, has always been an interesting place.
978-1-55152-829-8
In 1953, the skeletons of two little boys were uncovered by a Vancouver Parks Board worker in the bushes of Stanley Park, not far from the entrance to Lions Gate Bridge. Both were likely killed about five years earlier. Eve Lazarus points out in her creepy, saddening and necessary book, Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders, that they were slain around the time seven-year-old Roddy Moore was inexplicably beaten to death on his way to school in East Vancouver in 1947.
The good news in Eve Lazarus' Cold Case Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp)--if there can be any good news in a book about unsolved murders--is that the homicide rate has been falling in Canada. Near the outset of the 21st century, murder accounted for 0.1 percent of all police-reported violent crime.
Vancouver was becoming safer than ever, with one of the lowest murder rates in North America. In 1962, Vancouver had eighteen murders with a population of less than 400,000; by 2013, the city's population had more than doubled and yet there were only six murders.
That disparity can be partially explained by demographics. The percentage of the population comprised of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five-the demographic that commits seventy-five percent of homicides in most countries-had dropped considerably since the 1970s.
In 2015, the VPD had 337 unsolved murders on its books dating back to 1970. Police will not comment about these crimes on the record, but Eve Lazarus examined twenty-four of the city's most baffling unsolved murders between 1944 and 1996 for Cold Case Vancouver.
As a populist historian, Lazarus developed a lively but authoritative tone in three previous B.C. heritage titles. For Cold Case Vancouver, Lazarus was more like a respectful reporter, avoiding sensationalism, as she relates the facts, without lurid or rumoured conjectures, adding maps, archival photos and newspaper clippings.
There's the case of the young country singer Debbie Roe, just back from success in Nashville, who was sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and left to drown in 1975 and also the first recorded gang murder in 1954 when Danny Brent was shot in the head, probably by hired killers from Montreal, and left on the tenth hole of the UBC golf course.
Sex rears its ugly head in numerous entries, including the case of an in-the-closet gay man, Robert Hopkins, who was found strangled and shot in the head in his home in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area. We learn from BC Gay and Lesbian archivist Ron Dutton that if a crime against a gay person ever did make it to court up until the 1980s, the "homosexual panic defence" was a standard tactic for defence lawyers. A defendant could claim he was so horrified to be propositioned by a gay person that extreme retaliation could be deemed acceptable by the court.
Conversely, when a man attacked thirty women in the early 1950s, he was dubbed "the love bandit" by the press. In that era, domestic violence was largely ignored and women were chronically at-risk in their homes.
"Certainly in the Fifties," says Neil Boyd, Director of SFU's School of Criminology, "it was totally permissible for mother and fathers to whack their children in the grocery store. Teachers would hit children, and the notion that a man could 'correct' his spouse was seen as totally acceptable."
Lazarus has not merely regurgitated stories from the likes of retired Vancouver Police staff sergeant, Joe Swan, who operated the Vancouver Police Centennial Museum and wrote an historical crime column for the West Ender newspaper commencing in 1983. His accounts of murder cases were reprinted in A Century of Service: Vancouver Police 1886-1986 (Vancouver Police Historical Society, 1986) and Police Beat: 24 Vancouver Murders (Vancouver: Cosmopolitan Publishing, 1991).
Instead Lazarus has consulted a wide range of informants and undertaken some original research, most strikingly in her introductory story about the grisly fate of twenty-four-year-old Jennie Conroy whose body was found near the West Vancouver cemetery in 1944.
A disturbing percentage of victims in Cold Case Vancouver are female; and we learn we are most at-risk to be murdered if we are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
"The truly frightening thing is," Lazarus writes, "is that these killers might still walk around among us. As a forensic expert for the Vancouver Police Department said, even with DNA and all the scientific improvements, 'we don't catch the smart ones.'"
It's common knowledge that Canuck Place in Shaughnessy was previously a mansion that served as the headquarters for a Vancouver chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, but there are many other addresses in the Lower Mainland with skeletons in their closets.
The Australian-born journalist and freelance writer Eve Lazarus of North Vancouver examined the social histories of heritage houses in Greater Vancouver for At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil 2007).
Lazarus followed with Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens: Tales from the Capital City (Anvil 2012). It received the 2015 City of Vancouver Heritage Award for a book that heightens awareness of the historic value of Vancouver's early neighbourhoods.
Lazarus returned to print with Sensational Vancouver (Anvil 2014). Including a walking tour map of Strathcona and Chinatown, Lazarus highlighted the famous and the infamous, particular the latter from the first half of the 20th century when 'Terminal City' was a hotbed for bookies, brothels and bootleggers. Lazarus makes the (disputed) claim that Canada's first female cop was Lurancy Harris who patrolled the houses of ill repute on Alexander Street. Opium dens and gambling joints were the purview of Detective Joe Ricci. Sensational Vancouver also celebrates remarkable women such as Elsie MacGill, Phyllis Munday, Nellie Yip Quong and Joy Kogawa-along with entertainers, artists and controversial characters.
Between 2004 and 2015, more than 10,000 demolition permits were issued for residential buildings in the city of Vancouver. As of 2015, an average of three houses a day were being torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to merit heritage protection, but Caroline Adderson and other Vancouver writers--including Eve Lazarus--believed the demoliton of these dwellings amounted to an architectural loss. Adderson spearheaded Vancouver Vanishes: Narratives of Demolition and Revival (Anvil 2015), co-authored with Eve Lazarus, John Atkin, Kerry Gold, Evelyn Lau, John Mackie, Elise & Stephen Partridge and Bren Simmers. The introduction is by heritage artist and activist Michael Kluckner--who had published a book called Vanishing Vancouver--and photographs are by Tracey Ayton and Adderson. Eve Lazarus "blogs obsessively about houses and their genealogies" at www.evelazarus.com/blog/
AWARDS:
Shorlisted for Bill Duthie booksellers' Choice Award in
2016 for Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
Heritage Award for Heritage Advocacy
2013 District of North Vancouver
City of Vancouver Book Award
2008 Finalist for At Home with History
Kenneth R. Wilson Awards
2007 Gold - best merchandizing/marketing article "Keep it Real," Marketing Magazine
2001 Gold - best merchandizing/marketing article "Sizing up the Sizzle," Marketing Magazine
BOOKS:
Frommer's with Kids Vancouver (Toronto: CDG Books, 2001)
At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil, 2007) $20 1895636802
The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue, 2009) $34.95 Co-authored by Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson.
Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens (Anvil, 2012) $24 9781927380062
Sensational Vancouver (Anvil, 2014) $24 9781927380987
Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders (Arsenal, 2015) $21.95 9781551526294
Blood, Sweat, and Fear (Arsenal, 2017) $21.95 9781551526850
Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing True Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer (Arsenal 2018) $21.95 9781551527468
Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City's Hidden History (Arsenal 2020) $32.95 9781551528298
Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Sensational Murder & Missing Persons Cases (Arsenal, 2022) $22.95 9781551529073
[BCBW 2023]
REVIEW
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver's First Forensic
Investigator
by Eve Lazarus
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017.
$21.95 / 9781551526850
Reviewed by Bonnie Reilly Schmidt
*
In Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver's First Forensic Investigator Eve Lazarus rescues one of the most important actors in the history of forensic science in Canada from obscurity.
This book features the work of John F.C.B. Vance, a chemist originally hired as a city analyst for the City of Vancouver in 1907, who eventually achieved the rank of honorary police inspector as a forensic investigator with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).
For forty-two years, Vance was on the cutting edge of some of the most innovative advances in police forensics in North America, earning him headlines and an international reputation. His exceptional work went beyond blood type analysis; it extended to the examination of fingerprints, glass, gravel, clothing, guns, tire tracks, and even shoe polish from crime scenes resulting in the conviction, or exoneration, of hundreds of accused in criminal cases.
This book is not, however, a biography of Vance, a fact that Lazarus is up front about in her introduction. Readers may be disappointed with this approach, especially since Lazarus had access to Vance's family and their personal papers. We anticipate hearing more about J.F.C.B., as he was called by the family, particularly when we read that Lazarus discovered envelopes of police evidence such as hair samples, autopsy reports, and crime scene photographs in a box in the garage of one of Vance's grandchildren.
We do learn that Vance was a workaholic who rarely took vacations or spent weekends away from the office. He was also obsessed with inventing a machine that gave "human odour a physical form,"; much like a fingerprint, to "detect, capture, and record individual human smells"; from a crime scene. But little else is known about him as a person.
Instead, Vance's career serves as the backdrop in the book for the crimes he investigated. Lazarus adroitly selects some of Vancouver's most infamous crimes to highlight Vance's forensic abilities, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, arguably the apex of his career.
In addition to the materials provided by the Vance family, Lazarus relies on accounts from newspapers, the City of Vancouver archives, and the Vancouver Police Department's annual reports as her primary sources.
Lazarus writes in a highly readable style, demonstrating an ability to distill what was probably a tremendous amount of archival information into a narrative that does not overwhelm the reader with excessive detail. Her research is complimented by a number of interesting photographs, most contributed by the Vance family.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the description of the corruption that characterized the culture of the VPD during the last century. In some ways, the VPD was a progressive police force: it hired the first female police officers in Canada in 1912 and later Vance as a forensic scientist in 1914.
In other ways, the VPD was associated with corrupt police practices. In 1934, several attempts were made on Vance's life over a seven-month period. Although some of these attempts were thought to have been perpetrated by accused criminals trying to prevent Vance from testifying against them, his notebooks reveal that he also suspected jealous colleagues. Vance wrote that "the chief was behind the attacks . . . or at the very least knew who was,"; an important piece of Vancouver police history that would remain hidden if not for Lazarus's research.
By the time Vance retired in 1949, he had outlasted thirteen police chiefs and sixteen mayors. When he left his office for the last time, Vance took the files of two unsolved murders and his notebooks with him.
He also took the box of evidence that eventually made it into his grandchild's garage and Lazarus's hands, an act that proved pivotal in resurrecting Vance as one of Vancouver's most famous and accomplished civil servants.
*
Bonnie Reilly Schmidt worked as a police officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police between 1977 and 1987.
*
REVIEW
Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing True Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer
by Eve Lazarus
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018
$21.95 / 9781551527468
Reviewed by Larry Hannant
*
True crime "may be the dominant genre of our time," according to Globe and Mail media writer Simon Houpt. And little wonder. It's got much going for it. The inherent mystery of a fictive whodunit is bolstered by a factual foundation that gives both writer and reader plenty of detail to sink their teeth into.Still, true crime puts a writer to the test. Since the events actually happened, an internet search will quickly yield the conclusion that the foul deed was done by the Plutocrat in the White House with a Tweet. Case closed.
So the true crime writer can't entice the reader down dead-end paths, dangle false clues, or introduce clearly-guilty suspects who turn out to be innocent.
So how's the beleaguered writer to hold the reader's attention?
The question was answered in 1752 by the great French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire: "My secret is to force the reader to wonder: Will Philip V ascend the throne?" As it turned out, Philip would, even if the prospect of a member of the French royal family taking power in Spain would provoke the War of the Spanish Succession that raged through Europe and spread carnage even into the Americas from 1700 to 1713. Consumed by suspense as they undoubtedly were, Voltaire's readers already knew the answer to the dilemma he posed.
Eve Lazarus. Photo by Rebecca Blissett
Thus advised, successful true crime writers since the 18th century have crafted their words to make the inevitable seem uncertain.
Eve Lazarus takes on this task in Murder by Milkshake, an examination not just of a bizarre case of poisoning in mid-1960s Vancouver, but also of the gawky city in which it took place. The Vancouver Lazarus sketches was an unsophisticated adolescent whose beauty had not yet become iconic and for whom culture was still dangerous terrain. In 1962, for instance, the edgy U.S. comedian-social commentator Lenny Bruce performed once at Isy’s Supper Club. The redoubtable journalist Jack Wasserman attacked the show, and the city's licensing boss threatened to close the club. Bruce was sent packing.
Vancouver College graduate Rene Castellani and Esther Luond were married in 1946 at Holy Rosary Cathedral, Vancouver
High culture in 1960s Vancouver: Rene Castellani as the Maharaja of Aleebaba. Vancouver Public Library photo
Lazarus deftly weaves her main characters into this still-conservative social milieu. Rene Castellani was an ambitious radio personality with a flair for self-promotion who had reached the cusp of success after a chequered career repairing washing machines and managing out-of-the-way hotels. He was riding high in what was the heyday of the radio boom of the early 1960s at CKNW, which a news reporter described as "the most promotion-minded station you could imagine." He excelled at inventing on-air and street-level personas like Klatu from Outer Space and the Maharaja of Aleebaba who had credulous Vancouverites believing in alien invasions and Indian potentates intent on buying up British Columbia.
Esther Castellani worked at Cordell women's wear in the 1950s
Esther Castellani, married to Rene since 1946, worked part time at a children's store, assumed most of the tasks to raise their young daughter, Jeannine, loved nothing more than a White Spot meal of a burger, fries and a milkshake, and repented for days on failed diets of cottage cheese.
Lolly Miller was a widow fifteen years younger than Esther who worked as a receptionist at CKNW. Her birth name was Adelaide, but "Lolly the Dolly" was the name that stuck at the radio station.
By 1964, rumours of an adulterous affair between the ebullient Rene and Lolly were rife, such that CKNW management warned them about the controversy. In May 1965, Lolly was fired over the issue, despite being the sole parent for her six-year-old son. Rene was spared, in part because his wife was already seriously ill, suffering a combination of ailments that baffled doctors.
Before the wide-ranging 1969 reform of the divorce, abortion, and birth control laws that gave Pierre Trudeau an early reputation as a progressive, the only grounds for divorce in Canada was adultery, and the divorce itself had to be by mutual consent. That agreement was not likely to occur between Rene and Esther.
The Castellanis, circa 1964: Esther, Cocoa, Rene, Jeannine
Bring on more milkshakes, laced, as it turned out, with arsenic. But no one suspected that on 11 July 1965, when Esther died after more than six agonizing weeks at Vancouver General Hospital. Three days later, one day after Esther's funeral, Rene, Lolly and their two children drove off in the CKNW car for a holiday in Disneyland.
What killed the perfect crime was the dogged determination of Dr. Bernard Moscovitch, the internist who had cared for Esther. His persistence, augmented by two astute forensic specialists and diligent work by two Vancouver police detectives, produced the cause of death and, still under the kitchen sink at the Castellani home, the source of the arsenic, weed killer.
Rene was arrested, charged and convicted of murder. Sentenced to death, his punishment was commuted to life in prison less than two weeks before he was due to hang.
Adelaide (Lolly) Miller after the inquest into the death of Esther Castellani. Photo by Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun
An experienced crime writer, Lazarus lays out the case in a capable fashion, although two lengthy chapters of background mean that the story doesn't begin to get some wind until page 40. And considering her list of five previous books of true crime and historical mysteries, her account of the trial of Rene comes across as lacking the element of suspense that Voltaire argued was essential. In a single paragraph of 75 words, for instance, she skims over the defence attorney's plea for acquittal, the jury's deliberations and guilty verdict, and the judge's imposition of the death penalty. What might have been played for drama comes across as matter of fact.
Having passed over the trial, Lazarus follows up with an extended assessment of the impact of the trauma on Jeannine Castellani, the couple's daughter. Understandably troubled by the loss of her mother and the realization of her father's crime and his ruthless manipulation of her, Jeannine struggled for years to address the carnage that consumed her youth.
This focus on the living victim could be especially appealing to women readers, who, again according to the Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt, make up 80 percent of the true crime audience. The focus on Jeannine also reveals a laudable effort to minimize the sense of exploitation that is felt by some survivors of actual crimes who are featured later in books and films.
As a social history, Murder by Milkshake gives us a portrait of a city still on the brink of finding itself, far from today's shimmering metropolis that's consistently among the top ten of the world's most livable cities. That snapshot of a city populated by ambitious, struggling people gives the book special merit.
*
Larry Hannant
A history professor and an award-winning book author and website contributor, Larry Hannant presents history in a variety of formats. He's the author or editor of three books, including The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art (1998), which won the Robert S. Kenny Prize in Left/Labour Studies. His forthcoming book is an edited collection titled Bucking Conservatism: Alternative Stories of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s (2019). The award-winning website Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History includes two sections from him. In addition to non-fiction, he's published poetry, creative non-fiction, short stories, and articles in a number of magazines and newspapers. He's an adjunct associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria.
*
Other reviews of the author's work by BC studies:
Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens
Sensational Vancouver
Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
++++++++++++++++++
Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History by Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp $32.95)
Chuck Davis would have loved and devoured Eve Lazarus’ Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.
This is not another predictable re-hash of stories and anecdotes gleaned from Davis, the city’s master gatherer who gave us The Vancouver Book (1976) and The Greater Vancouver Book (1997). Instead Lazarus has done her own sleuthing, aided and abetted by internet informants and generous peers such as John Atkin, Michael Kluckner and John Carter.
The result is a potpourri of forgotten art works, eccentric museums, oddball houses, dismantled architectural gems, and a belly-flop contest, as Lazarus explores Vancouver’s neighbourhoods with equal measures of humour and pathos.
Highlights include: Vancouver’s first horse race was held on a downtown street in 1887; Vancouverites drove on the left-hand side of the road until January 1, 1922—one of the last areas in Canada to change over; the rundown Regent Hotel in the Downtown Eastside was a ritzy place when it opened a century ago; Vancouver’s first hospital was located on West Pender Street between Cambie and Beatty; Canada’s first gas station opened at the corner of Cambie and Smithe in 1907 (when there were only 2,131 cars registered in the entire country); the VanTan Nudist Club, founded in 1939, is still operational; and stonemason Jimmy Cunningham who devoted 32 years of his life building the seawall, didn’t live to see it finished when he died in 1963.
Yes, there is, arguably, some filler material, and well-known figures like Trinidad-born Joe Fortes, Vancouver’s first official lifeguard. But even long-time Vancouver history buffs cannot fail to be impressed by Lazarus’ blend of the bizarre, the hidden, the destroyed and the over-looked.
Vancouver Exposed is exemplary popular history, so much so that it succeeds in being disturbing. It’s more proof that Vancouver, as captured by photographer Fred Herzog and celebrated by Chuck Davis, has always been an interesting place.
978-1-55152-829-8
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen
Review
In her incarnation as a literary Florence Nightingale, Mona Fertig has set about rescuing the reputations of little-known B.C. artists-such as her father, George Fertig, who died unheralded in 1983-and sculptor David Marshall. Her next three candidates for revival are Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen.
As Molnar is the only one of trio still living, his self-portrait graces the cover of Fertig's second volume in her Unheralded Artists of B.C. series, The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman & LeRoy Jensen (Mother Tongue $34.95) with texts by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall and Wendy Newbold Patterson respectively.
Frank Molnar (1936- ) fled from Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and went to the USA where he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1962 he arrived in Vancouver and later met artists David Marshall, Peter Aspell, Georg Schmerholz, Elek Imredy and Jack Akroyd. In 1969 he became one of the first art teachers at Capilano College where he taught life drawing and artistic anatomy for almost 30 years. His students included Charles Van Sandwyk, Cori Creed and Will Rafuse. Today he continues to paint and lives in Vancouver with his wife Sylvia.
Jack Hardman (1923-1996) was born in New Westminster and studied art in Western Washington and at UBC. He married B.C. poet Marya Fiamengo in the 1950s. A sculptor and a printmaker, he was an assistant to Cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko in 1957. Hardman taught many art students in Burnaby in the '60s, and from the mid '70s through the '80s he was the Director of the Burnaby Art Gallery. His friends included artists Joe Plaskett, Jim Willer, Joy Zemel Long, David Marshall and Peter Paul Ochs. He lived in Burnaby where he died in 1996.
LeRoy Jensen (1927- 2005) spent his childhood in China, Japan and Vancouver. He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, as well as with the French cubist Andre L'Hote in Paris. In 1954 he returned to Vancouver to paint and forged a friendship with artists Jack Hardman, George Fertig, David Marshall and Peter Aspell. He was a founding member of Greenpeace and later a member of the Victoria-based Limner group. In 1982 he moved to Salt Spring Island with his family, where he fought for social environmental causes and continued to paint the human condition, especially women, until his death in 2005.
978-1-896949-02-4
Sensational Vancouver (Anvil $24)
Review (2014)
As a social historian who doubles as a sleuth for secrets, Eve Lazarus is happy to let the world know that the mansion called Canuck Place in Shaughnessy is the former headquarters for a Vancouver chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
She likewise uncovered an original building where painter Emily Carr had lived, while preparing Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens: Tales from the Capital City (Anvil 2012).
Now Lazarus has risen again. In Sensational Vancouver (Anvil $24), she delights in exposing how Vancouver was once a hotbed for bookies, brothels, bootleggers and unsolved murders.
Canada's first female cop, Lurancy Harris, patrolled the houses of ill repute on Alexander Street and the city's opium dens and gambling joints were the purview of Detective Joe Ricci-but it wasn't all film noir skulduggery.
Sensational Vancouver also celebrates entertainers, artists and remarkable women such as Elsie MacGill, mountain climber Phyllis Munday, novelist Joy Kogawa and Nellie Yip Quong (1882-1949), easily the most unusual of Eve Lazarus' discoveries.
Including a walking tour map of Strathcona and Chinatown, Sensational Vancouver spotlights Nellie Yip Quong's residence at 783 East Pender-hyped as the home for the city's "first inter-racial marriage.";
That's a bit of a stretch. First Nations women had been co-habitating with European newcomers for decades. But for a white Roman Catholic woman to take the surname of a Chinese husband in the year 1900 was most certainly extraordinary.
Nellie Yip quong was born as nellie towers in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1882. Educated in the U.S., she was an English teacher in New York City when she fell in love with a successful jeweler from a little town called Vancouver. This was Charles Yip Quong, nephew of wealthy Yip Sang.
[B.C. history buffs know about Yip Sang. An orphan with no prospects, he managed to save enough money to make an 80-day journey from China to San Francisco in 1864, at age nineteen. He found work in a restaurant and gradually taught himself English. At age 36, he put his belongings on a cart and trudged north through Oregon and Washington, eventually reaching Vancouver where he sold sacks of coal door-to-door. As outlined in Frances Hern's Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians (Heritage 2011), Yip Sang, at age 37, was hired as a bookkeeper and paymaster for Lee Piu, who oversaw the hiring of Chinese labourers for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yip Sang was soon elevated to the position of superintendent, organizing as many as 7,000 Chinese workers who comprised as much as 75 percent of the CPR's workforce. Later successful with an import/export business, he built the two-storey Wing Sang building in 1889. Designated a heritage building in 1999, the oldest remaining building in Vancouver's Chinatown, at 51-69 East Pender Street, is now owned and renovated by 'condo king' Bob Rennie, who operates a private art gallery on the site.]
When Nellie Towers married Charles Yip, her parents disowned her and she was spurned by the Catholic Church. After the pair lived in China for a few years, they returned to Vancouver in 1904 and were afforded refuge by Yip Sang in his Wing Sang Building.
The young couple shared lodgings with Yip Sang's three wives and their 23 children.
Yip Sang had allocated one floor per wife-or one wife per floor-and one for a classroom. Yip Sang's lack of formal schooling was counter-balanced by his Confucian values, such as self-improvement. He sponsored the Oy Kuo School for adult education and served as its principal for ten years. He wanted his own children to attend Canadian public schools for integration purposes but he simultaneously hired private tutors from China and Hong Kong to teach them Chinese.
It was from this environment that Nellie was able to master five Chinese dialects. She soon became a vital and outspoken link between two vastly divergent cultures.
"Nellie fought on behalf of the Chinese,"; Lazarus writes, "She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying 'No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,' Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.";
The Wing Sang Building also served as an opium production facility. Nellie and Charles Yip Quong moved six blocks away from the Wing Sang Building to 783 East Pender Street in 1917, where her husband did most of the cooking and gardening. Nellie proceeded to deliver an estimated 500 Chinese Canadian babies.
The bi-racial couple adopted numerous children, including Eleanor (Yip) Lum who has visited the present owner of the house, Wayne Avery. She described for him one of her favourite memories of Nellie-as a large imposing woman, wearing a wide hat, with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.
According to Lazarus, during renovations, Wayne Avery discovered his house has also served as a bootlegging joint and a brothel. "He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors,"; she writes.
As well, Sensational Vancouver reveals that tenants of the house prior to Nellie and Charles Yip Quong included Nora and Ross Hendrix, the grandparents of Jimi Hendrix.
Eve Lazarus previously examined the social histories of heritage houses in Greater Vancouver for At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil 2007). She "blogs obsessively"; about houses and their genealogies at www.evelazarus.com
978-1-927380-98-7
BCBW 2014
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders (Arsenal Pulp Press $21.95)
Article (2016)
Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders by Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp Press $21.95)
The good news-if there can be any good news in a book about unsolved murders-is that the homicide rate is falling in Canada. These days murder accounts for 0.1 percent of all police-reported violent crime.
Vancouver is safer than ever, with one of the lowest murder rates in North America. Whereas in 1962, Vancouver had eighteen murders with a population of less than 400,000, by 2013, the city's population had more than doubled and yet there were only six murders.
That disparity can be partially explained by demographics. The percentage of the population comprised of men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five-the demographic that commits seventy-five percent of homicides in most countries-has dropped considerably since the 1970s.
The Vancouver Police Department has 337 unsolved murders on its books dating back to 1970. Police will not comment about these crimes on the record, but Eve Lazarus has examined twenty-four of the city's most puzzling unsolved murders between 1944 and 1996 for Cold Case Vancouver: The City's Most Baffling Unsolved Murders.
As a populist historian, Lazarus has developed a lively but authoritative tone in three previous B.C. heritage titles. For Cold Case Vancouver, Lazarus is more like a respectful reporter, avoiding sensationalism, as she relates the facts, without lurid or rumoured conjectures, adding maps, archival photos and newspaper clippings.
There's the well-known 1953 'Babes in the Woods' story about the skeletons of two little boys uncovered by a Vancouver Parks Board worker in Stanley Park. Both were likely killed about six years earlier. Lazarus points out they were slain around the time seven-year-old Roddy Moore was inexplicably beaten to death on his way to school in East Vancouver in 1947.
There's the case of the young country singer Debbie Roe, just back from success in Nashville, who was sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and left to drown in 1975 and also the first recorded gang murder in 1954 when Danny Brent was shot in the head, probably by hired killers from Montreal, and left on the tenth hole of the UBC golf course.
Sex rears its ugly head in numerous entries, including the case of an in-the-closet gay man, Robert Hopkins, who was found strangled and shot in the head in his home in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area. We learn from B.C. Gay and Lesbian archivist Ron Dutton that up until the 1980s if a crime against a gay person ever did make it to court, the "homosexual panic defence"; was a standard tactic for defence lawyers. A defendant could claim he was so horrified to be propositioned by a gay person that extreme retaliation could be deemed acceptable by the court.
Conversely, when a man attacked thirty women in the early 1950s, he was dubbed "the love bandit"; by the press. In that era, domestic violence was largely ignored and women were chronically at-risk in their homes.
"Certainly in the Fifties,"; says Neil Boyd, director of SFU's School of Criminology, "it was totally permissible for mothers and fathers to whack their children in the grocery store. Teachers would hit children, and the notion that a man could 'correct' his spouse was seen as totally acceptable.";
Lazarus has not merely regurgitated stories from the likes of retired Vancouver Police staff sergeant, Joe Swan, who operated the Vancouver Police Centennial Museum and wrote an historical crime column for the West Ender newspaper commencing in 1983. His accounts of murder cases were reprinted in A Century of Service: Vancouver Police 1886-1986 (Vancouver Police Historical Society, 1986) and Police Beat: 24 Vancouver Murders (Cosmopolitan Publishing, 1991).
Instead Lazarus has consulted a wide range of informants and undertaken some original research, most strikingly in her introductory story about the grisly fate of twenty-four-year-old Jennie Conroy whose body was found near the West Vancouver cemetery in 1944.
A disturbing percentage of victims in Cold Case Vancouver are female; and we learn we are most at-risk to be murdered if we are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
"The truly frightening thing is,"; Lazarus writes, "that these killers might still walk around among us. As a forensic expert for the Vancouver Police Department said, even with DNA and all the scientific improvements, 'we don't catch the smart ones.'";
978-1-55152-629-4
BCBW (Spring 2016)
