Vancouver Police Department

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

The Black Hand’s Vancouver Connection

by Eve Lazarus on August 27, 2016

Joe Ricci’s story is in Sensational Vancouver

Joe was a kick-arse Italian cop who worked for the Vancouver Police Department between 1912 and 1928 and didn’t get bogged down in the details. He’d kick down the doors of opium dens, shoot first and ask questions later, and not worry too much about legal things like warrants and warnings.

The Black Hand (La Mano Nera) was an extortion racket, a sort of early form of the Mafia, that was well established in major Italian communities in American cities in the early part of last century.

Typically, a member of the Black Hand Society would send a letter to a target threatening violence, kidnapping, arson or even murder if they didn’t pay protection money. The letter was often decorated with a smoking gun, a noose or a knife dripping with blood, and accompanied with the message: “held up in the universal gesture of warning” drawn in thick black ink.

Black hand letter 2

In November 1923, Joe was flipping through the circulars and pictures of wanted criminals, when he stopped at one, sat back and whistled softly. Starring back at him was the face of Dominic Delfino, a lieutenant and hit man for the Black Hand Society who was wanted by every police department in the U.S. after his escape from jail several years before.

Just a few hours earlier one of Joe’s informants had tipped him off that a “very bad Italian—maybe a murderer” was being held in a jail cell in Nelson, BC, on an immigration charge. The prisoner had boasted: “I shot my way out of the death house, and they’ll never hold me very long.”

Delfino had been held in a county jail in Pennsylvania charged with multiple murders. Before he could be transferred to his execution in New York, two of his colleagues disguised as nuns managed to smuggle in a saw and a revolver. Delfino escaped, murdering four guards on the way out.

Joe decided to play a hunch and went to Nelson to see for himself. Delfino wouldn’t talk, but the detective identified him from the mug shot. Delfino was sent back to the States and electrocuted. Ricci received front page headlines and collected a $500 reward.

Tags Dominic Delfino, Joe Ricci, La Mano Nera, Sensational Vancouver, The Black Hand, Vancouver Police Department

Meet Lurancy Harris: Canada’s First Woman Police Officer

by Eve Lazarus on March 7, 2015

Lurancy Harris and Minnie Millar became the first two women police officers in Canada when they were hired by the VPD in 1912

The following is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.

Lurancy Harris and the Vancouver Police Department — Lurancy Harris ca.1915. Vancouver Archives

Joins VPD:

Lurancy Harris was a 48-year-old seamstress from Nova Scotia had moved to Vancouver in 1911 and rented a small apartment on Robson at Howe. One day she was flipping through a newspaper when an ad caught her eye. The Vancouver Police Department was looking for “two good reliable women” to form the nucleus of a women’s protective division centred around issues of morality and protecting the safety of wayward women and children.

She and Millar were sworn in as fourth class constables, the lowest rank in the department with a salary of $80 a month. The women were given full police powers and thrown into the job with no training, no uniform and no gun.

First Arrest:

Lurancy made her first arrest five months after she was hired. In the Prisoner Record book of 1912 at the Vancouver Police Museum, Annie Smith, 38, alias Mrs. Stanfield, a bigamist from England told police that she believed that her husband was dead and had answered a personal ad in a Spokane newspaper, met and then married a Mr. Stanfield. On account of his “cruelty” she fled to Vancouver with her two small children. Stanfield found her, found the original Mr. Smith and the two men went to police. While Annie was found “technically guilty” she was given a suspended sentence “on account of the troubles and suffering she had endured.”

Arrest of Lorena Mathews:

Lurancy’s big break came a month later when she was given the task of escorting Lorena Mathews on the train back to Oklahoma after she was arrested in Vancouver. Mathews had bolted across the continent with her two children and Jim Chapman, her 25-year-old black lover who was suspected of helping her murder her much older husband. Chapman was convicted, Mathews was acquitted, and Lurancy got a promotion.

In 1916, Lurancy bought a lot on Venables Street in East Vancouver. She had a small craftsman house built and planted a monkey tree. The house is still there, a second floor was added in 1983, and the monkey tree towers over it all.

By all accounts, Lurancy had an amazing career. In 1924 she was promoted to inspector, although she was kept at the pay scale of a sergeant. She retired in 1928 aged 65.

While more women gradually joined the police force, things were slow to change. Women did not get uniforms until 1947, they were not allowed to drive police cars until 1948 (they went to calls on foot or took the street car), and it wasn’t until the 1970s that women had the right to carry firearms and were assigned to the same duties as their male counterparts.

Tags 1836 Venables, International Women's Day, Jim Chapman, Lorena Mathews, Lurancy Harris, Minnie Millar, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Police Department, Vancouver Police Museum

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on January 25, 2014

When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog Past Tense. The blog morphed into a weekly writing gig with Bob Kronbauer’s Vancouver is Awesome and last year he published Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.

“I did my Masters degree at SFU on a local subject,” he says. “I’d find out all these interesting things that were not directly related to my thesis, but I collected them anyway and after I was done I had all this material that I wanted to share, so I started blogging.”

There are a lot of great stories in Vancouver was Awesome, but one that caught my attention was a photo of 500 Alexander Street, a one-time brothel built and owned by Dolly Darlington in 1912. For years it was the headquarters for the British Seaman’s Mission and today it’s run by the Atira Women’s Resource Society as housing for at-risk teens.

What I learned from Lani is that back in the 1950s, the building also played a role in Vancouver’s drug history as the mailing address for Al Hubbard, an eccentric American millionaire with a penchant for LSD. Hubbard, writes Lani, became the biggest North American supplier of LSD through his Uranium Corporation. Hubbard apparently turned a number of people onto LSD including Aldous Huxley, the head of Vancouver’s Holy Rosary Cathedral, and then partnered up with Ross MacLean, a high profile psychiatrist who for a time owned Casa Mia and ran the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster.

There’s a great picture of Harry Gardiner “The Human Fly” climbing the Sun Tower in 1918, and a photo of a 17-year-old Yvonne de Carlo with a boxing kangaroo. Lani tells the story of Percy Williams, a skinny little guy, who for 11 years, was the fastest man alive; and the story of George Paris, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Western Canada, personal trainer to Jack Johnson, boxing trainer for the Vancouver Police Department and a jazz musician at the Patricia Hotel.

When he’s not blogging or writing books, Lani lives on the edge of Chinatown with his daughter Sophia and works at a DTES hotel for Atira.

Tree Stump House 1900s, now 4230 Prince Edward Street in Mount Pleasant

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