Sweat

Episode 11: Walter Pavlukoff: Manhunt

by Eve Lazarus on August 2, 2019

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

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:

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator, by Eve Lazarus (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017)
Angelo Branca: Gladiator of the Courts, by Vincent Moore (Douglas and McIntyre, 1981)
Inquest for Sidney Petrie (BC Archives)
Vital Statistics
The personal files of Inspector John F.C.B. Vance
Newspapers: Vancouver Sun, Province, Vancouver News Herald, Calgary Herald, Lethbridge Herald, Globe & Mail

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Tags and Fear, Blood, CIBC, Inspector Vance, Manhunt, PNE parade, Sweat, Walter Pavlukoff

The East Cordova Street Murder Factory

by Eve Lazarus on July 8, 2017

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).

Tags 629 East Cordova Street, American Can Company, and Fear, Blood, Hastings Sawmill, Inspector Vance, J.F.C.B. Vance, John Vance, Naokichi Watanabe, Shinkichi Sakurada, Sweat, Tadao Hitomi

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

by Eve Lazarus on June 10, 2017

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.

Tags and Fear, Blood, Greatest Detective Cases, Inside Detective, Inspector Vance, Master Detective, Special Detective Cases, Sweat, True Detective, Vancouver Police Department

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