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Inspector Vance

Episode 11: Walter Pavlukoff: Manhunt

by Eve Lazarus on August 2, 2019
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Walter Pavlukoff stepped out of his hotel room on August 25, 1947 and joined the PNE parade. Then he robbed a bank and murdered the manager. 

 

PNE parade
August 25, 1947. Courtesy CVA 180-1328
PNE Parade

On August 25, 1947, 34-year-old Walter Pavlukoff stepped out of his hotel room on East Cordova Street in Vancouver with a luger automatic pistol in his pocket. He joined over 100,000 people who were watching the Pacific National Exhibition parade—the first one in six years because of the war.

Walter then crossed the bridge to Kitsilano, bought a paper bag and a newspaper from a grocery store and proceeded to hold-up the CIBC on West Broadway (at MacKenzie).

CIBC Bank:

It was shortly before closing time and the bank was full of customers. Walter managed to shoot and kill the bank manager, before fleeing the bank empty-handed and pursued by half a dozen civilians and a police officer who happened to be sitting outside.

Walter managed to escape the roadblocks that were thrown up around Kitsilano, and didn’t come to police attention again for three days. A prison guard from Oakalla, where he had spent time, recognized him robbing the eggs from his Surrey farm.

On the run:

Armed police from all over Metro Vancouver converged in Surrey armed with rifles, automatics, sub machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and tear gas. It was early days for communications, so police borrowed walkie-talkies from the PNE to use for on-the-ground communication, and 200 hunters, trappers and other civilians joined in the chase. It was the largest manhunt in Vancouver’s history.

And, the Mounties got their man, Vancouver Sun July 9, 1953

You’ll be surprised how far he got, how long he evaded police, and how he was eventually caught.

Show Notes

Credits:

  • Intro and outro music: Duke Ellington’s St. Louie Toodle
  • Intro: Mark Dunn
  • Words of Walter Pavlukoff voiced by Matthew Dunn
  • Background track created by Nico Vettese
  • Outro: Audionetwork.com

Sources:

Featured Promo: Dark Poutine True Crime and Dark History

 

Nanaimo Mysteries

by Eve Lazarus on March 1, 2019
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With Aimee Greenaway, Nanaimo Mysteries curatorAimee Greenaway was reading Blood, Sweat, and Fear when she came across George Hannay, a safe cracker from Nanaimo. She’d heard a story about the former BC Provincial police officer turned criminal, but this was the first time she’d seen evidence of his crimes.

Aimee thought Hannay’s story would make a great inclusion in the museum’s new exhibit—Nanaimo Mysteries.

The exhibit opened February 16, and my friend (and book editor) Susan Safyan  and I went over to check it out. It’s the first time I’ve been to the Nanaimo Museum, and it blew me away.

Inspector Vance, the subject of Blood, Sweat, and Fear and founder of the Vancouver Police Museum’s building on East Cordova Street, gets a starring role. Vance was known as the “Sherlock Holmes of Canada” in the media at the time, and in 1934 there were seven attempts against his life. The last and most brutal was an attempt to blind him with acid and stop him from testifying against Hannay in court. The attack was thought to be instigated by Hannay—at least the note left in Vance’s garage was signed “Hannay’s pals”— (apparently criminals weren’t too smart back then either). The attack on Vance delayed the trial, but went ahead a few weeks later with the Inspector under police guard.

Province, October 10, 1934

Vance linked Hannay to the robbery through trace evidence. But even though fibres found at the scene were from Hannay’s clothing and a splinter in his coat matched a floor board, the jury was unable to reach a decision because the foreman—a friend of Hannay’s—refused to bring in a guilty verdict.

The material for this chapter and the archival material that Aimee has curated for the display, was found in the garage of one of Vance’s grandsons, in 2016 while I was researching the book.  He found several cardboard boxes filled with photos, newspaper clippings, forensic materials and case notes predating 1950. After the book was finished, the Vance family donated everything to the Vancouver Police Museum.

This is the first time any of these documents have been displayed, and there’s some intriguing, material including a letter that Hannay wrote to Vance’s boss in an attempt to discredit him. Aimee has also uncovered Hannay’s connection to Albert Planta, a corrupt senator from Nanaimo.

Nanaimo, it turns out, is quite mysterious. The exhibit has a section on hauntings and ghosts, another on murders and missing children, the red-light district and the infamous Brother X11, who started a cult in 1927 until 1932, when he and Madame Zee skipped town with donations from their wealthy followers.

The exhibit runs through until September 2, and if it’s your first time, there’s plenty of other things there to keep you fascinated, including the mystery of a samurai sword dug up in downtown Nanaimo in the late 1800s.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

The East Cordova Street Murder Factory

by Eve Lazarus on July 8, 2017
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When I was going through John Vance’s personal files for Blood, Sweat, and Fear, a small article torn from the pages of the long defunct Vancouver Star caught my eye. Vance’s handwriting dated it October 23, 1931 and it mentioned the murder of Naokichi Watanabe. Vance had clearly kept the clipping because he had testified that blood found on the suspect’s clothing was human.

I looked up other stories around that date to find out more about the case and was intrigued to find that it was much bigger than one murder and revolved around a house that still exists on East Cordova Street, about a block or so over from the former Japantown.

Historical Map-Guide, Japantown. Courtesy Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

In the heart of the Depression, Shinkichi Sakurada, a 40-year-old Hastings Sawmill worker, set himself up as a medicine man and started a private hospital in the six-room East Cordova house. Problem was, people would enter the hospital, take out an insurance policy, name him as their beneficiary, and shortly after, die.

The site of the murder factory
629 East Cordova Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2017

The scheme began to derail when Watanabe’s body was found by Sakurada behind the American Can Company. Sakurada told police that Watanabe lived at his house and when he had gone out that night and not returned, he had became worried and went to search for him.

Watanabe, had injured his back on the job the previous year and was about to receive a cheque from the Workmen’s Compensation Board. He planned to return to Japan the following week. Knowing that if Watanabe left the country he would never recover the money from his insurance policy, Sakurada became desperate and told Tadao Hitomi, he would forgive a debt and share some of the insurance money if he was willing to kill his friend Watanabe.

Naokichi Watanabe’s body was found lying across the CPR tracks behind the American Can Company at the foot of Princess Street. Hastings Sawmill  is visible. Photo courtesy Vancouver Public Library, 1926

The koroshi (killing) was reported widely in the Japanese papers, but the mainstream press took little interest until police called Sakurada’s modest house “a murder factory,” and the Globe and Mail ran a national story headlined “Murder Syndicate Collects Insurance on Victims’ Lives.” The newspaper reported that police suspected an “organized assassination ring” operated in Japantown and was responsible for as many as 20 deaths.

Sakurada and Hitomi were quickly dispatched to the gallows on December 30, 1931 at Oakalla Prison Farm.

You can read the full story in Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator, it’s one of the ten chapters in the book that follows individual crimes that Inspector Vance helped to solve during his 42-year career as head of the Police Bureau of Science (1907-1949).

Inspector Vance and the Noir Magazines of the 1930s and ’40s

by Eve Lazarus on June 10, 2017
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One of the many fascinating things that Inspector John Vance packed away when he retired from the Vancouver Police Department in 1949 were several true crime magazines. He appeared in all of them. Reporters were intrigued by this scientist who was able to convict criminals through the tiniest piece of trace evidence, or determine death by poison, or through his forensic skills in serology and firearms examination.

Reporters moonlighted for these magazines and had cozy relationships with police and sources that gave them access to information and photos unheard of on any crime beat today.

The early magazines ran fictionalized versions of sensational crimes. In one ironically called Real Crime Cases, Vance takes a starring role in a story called the “Mystery of the Missing Mrs. Millard” based on a 1914 murder investigation. The case is the first chapter in Blood, Sweat, and Fear, and it’s fascinating to read the “real” version in the magazine. In the magazine, Vance becomes a detective and is even given lines and solves the case. In reality, it was the first police case he worked on, and his job was to test a stain found on the carpet to see if it was blood.

True crime magazines
A typical drugstore display of magazines in the early 1940s. Courtesy CVA 1184-3279

In another case that I wrote about in Blood, Sweat, and Fear, the story of two murdered police officers in Merritt written up in Master Detective was so detailed and accurate with accompanying crime scene photos that it resulted in a sharp warning from the trial judge.

Later Vance appears in Inside Detective with the headline “They couldn’t kill the crime doctor.” He appears again in Special Detective Cases in a feature called “He makes his own miracles,” and in May 1942, Vance is the subject of a three-page feature in Greatest Detective Cases “Vancouver’s Police Wizard: Inspector Vance.”

According to a recent Vancouver Sun story the Canadian market for detective magazines came to an end when “moral outrage led to a 1949 Canadian law banning pictorial depictions of the commission of crimes real or fictitious,” sucking all the fun from the articles.

Predictably, Canadian true crime was a lot milder than its US counterparts. These were more like soft porn that featured cartoon-like pictures of women bound and gagged.

Detective magazines had a longer run in the U.S., they lasted into the 1970s, True Detective, which launched in 1924, managed to hang on until 1996. While interest in true crime never waned, tabloid television replaced the magazine.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

The train that ran down Hastings Street

by Eve Lazarus on September 3, 2016
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Tom Carter painting

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Did you know that a commuter train used to run right through downtown Vancouver? I found out about it when I was over at Tom Carter’s studio checking out one of his amazing paintings. There it was, a train chugging across Hastings Street.

Train on Hastings and Carrall Street. Photo courtesy Tom Carter
Train on Hastings and Carrall Street. Photo courtesy Tom Carter

The train came up again when I was writing a blog post a couple of weeks ago about getting the star of Blood, Sweat, and Fear—Inspector Vance—from his home in Yaletown to his lab at Hastings and Main Street. The 1907 map that I downloaded from Vancouver Archives showed four large blocks from Hastings to Water Street and from Cambie to Carrall Street were occupied by the BC Electric Railway Company.

BCER terminal, 1912. Photo courtesy CVA M-14-71
BCER terminal, 1912. Photo courtesy CVA M-14-71

The streetcars were already in place by then, in fact had been since 1891, but the interurban train came later, in 1911 after the BCER opened its spiffy new terminal, and a car full of officials made the first trip from Vancouver to New Westminster on March 1.

It’s hard to imagine now, but over five kilometres of track ran through city streets.

Courtesy Tom Carter
Courtesy Tom Carter

Tom, who seems to have a bottomless well of ephemera when it comes to anything to do with Vancouver history—particularly buildings, theatres and transportation—sent along this map (above) of the BCER in downtown Vancouver from the 1920s.

Photo ca.1920s courtesy Vancouver Archives Can 17
Photo ca.1920s courtesy Vancouver Archives Can 17

At its height, BC Electric operated 457 streetcars and 84 interurbans.

And, some good news. The BCER’s formal terminal is still there on the corner of Carrall and West Hastings Street.

Train BCER terminal now

For an upcoming blog I’m going to try and put together a list of the top 10 worst decisions when it comes to destroying Vancouver’s history and heritage. But I’ve got to think that the “from rails to rubber” should be right up there with the demolition of Birks and the second Hotel Vancouver.

1932 photo courtesy Vancouver Archives Can N32
1932 photo courtesy Vancouver Archives Can N32

Essentially, rails to rubber meant the end of the streetcars and interurban system. It was a nod to the power of the car and a desire not to spend the money to upgrade the transit system. If you’ve tried to drive across Vancouver lately, you’ll likely agree that it was the dumbest decision ever.

Nevertheless, the last streetcar made its final run in Vancouver in 1955, and three years later, the last of the interurbans finished up service in Steveston.

Sources for this story:

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

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