Last year, Constable Graham Walker of the Metro Vancouver Transit Police was asked to research the history for their 10-year anniversary. Graham promptly fell down the rabbit hole and his journey has taken him to UBC Special Collections, City of Vancouver Archives, BC Hydro Archives, and the Vancouver Police Museum. Graham’s first surprise was that the history of transit police goes back far longer than 2005 when a recommendation by the BC Association of Chiefs of Police led to the creation of the Transit Police.
On July 26, 1924, Janet Smith was found shot in the head by a .45 calibre automatic revolver in the basement of a Shaughnessy house. The murder of the Scottish nanny rocked Vancouver. The murder touched on high-level police corruption, kidnapping, drugs, society orgies and rampant racism. This is a short excerpt from my book At Home with History: The Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes
3851 Osler Street
Janet Smith was an attractive 23-year-old Scot who looked after Fred and Doreen Baker’s baby daughter.
The following story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria: “Murders in the Capital.”
A few years after the Bests’ bought their James Bay home, a young woman knocked on the door and asked if she could come and take a look inside. She told them that her grandparents had lived in the cottage in the 1950s and she’d grown up believing that they were killed in a car crash.
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
Jennie Eldon Conroy:
A few days after Cold Case Vancouver was finished and sent off for editing; I received an email from Daien Ide at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. Daien had come into the possession of a family album with the owner’s name, Miss J.
Look for the full story of Jennie Eldon Conroy in Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders
A couple of weeks ago, Daien Ide, reference historian at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives came into the possession of a photo album. At first she thought it was just a nice family photo album once owned by a Miss J.
On March 20, 1917 Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan, 44, was killed in a shootout with a drug addict. This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver:
Robert Tait, 32, a drug addict, police informant and pimp from Detroit lived in a rundown apartment over a grocery store at 522 East Georgia with his girlfriend Frankie Russell.