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Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Halloween Special 2021

by Eve Lazarus on October 15, 2021
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Halloween is my favourite unofficial holiday of the year, so it was especially rewarding to end Season 2 of Cold Case Canada with a Halloween Special. I reached out to five fabulous story tellers to tell me their favourite ghost stories—stories that take place in some of Metro Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods.

Will Woods, courtesy Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours
The Chinatown Ghost:

Will Woods, founder and chief storyteller at Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours tells us about his encounter with the Chinatown ghost. He also tell us what to expect on the Lost Souls of Gastown Tour including the unsolved murder of John Bray.

Bill Allman is the former theatre manager at the Vogue, one of Vancouver’s most haunted venues. Tom Carter photo.
East Georgia Street Murder:

Bill Allman is president of the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame, owner of Famous Artist Limited and a recovering Vancouver lawyer. He tells us about the ghost that haunted an East Georgia Street house after a violent shooting and murder of Vancouver police chief in  1917.

Michael Kluckner’s 1984 painting from his book Vancouver: The Way it Was depicts the shooting and murder of Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan and George Robb, 9 in 1917.
Haunted Piano:

Tom Carter is a Vancouver artist, historian and musician who shares his Vancouver loft with a haunted piano.

Tom Carter with his haunted 1865 Steinway piano. Dan Chambers photo.
Chinatown Nightclub:

When Tom was researching the Mandarin Garden (1936-1952) for his gorgeous painting, he found that the Chinatown nightclub was once owned by Chan See Wong Fong. After he died on the premises, staff began experiencing strange things. They heard voices, taps turned on by themselves, electrical devices became unplugged and there was a disembodied hand.

Mandarin Garden ca.1950s, Tom Carter painting 2021
Fort Langley Cemetery:

Aman Johal is a heritage interpreter at Fort Langley National Historic Site and he’s a storyteller for Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours. You can catch Aman live guiding the Grave Tale Walking tour between October 15 and November 7 and visit William Henry Emptage’s and his wife Louisa’s gravesites.

Aman Johan, courtesy Langley Advance Times
Riverview Hospital for the criminally insane:

Greg Mansfield is the author of Ghosts of Vancouver, the website and book. He takes us to Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, a now abandoned former asylum for the criminally insane.

CTV’s St. John Alexander and Greg Mansfield, October 2021. Eve Lazarus photo

For more ghostly stories check out these podcast episodes:

S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder

Victoria’s Ghost

SHOW NOTES

Sponsored by Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours.

Music:   October 31st by Myuu darkpiano.com (shortened version)

Podcast Promo:  Haunted AF

Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media

Got a true crime or history fan on your list this Christmas? Get your shopping out of the way ridiculously early with these Christmas Book offers or shoot me an email at eve@evelazarus.com for more information.

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

Murder by Milkshake Part 1

by Eve Lazarus on September 24, 2021
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In 1965, Rene Castellani, a 40-year-old radio personality decided to murder his wife Esther with arsenic-laced milkshakes so could marry Lolly, CKNW’s 25-year-old receptionist. The couple had an 11-year-old daughter called Jeannine, who became the collateral damage in one of the most sensational murder cases of the 20th century.

This podcast episode is based on my book Murder by Milkshake: an astonishing true story of adultery, arsenic and a charismatic killer

Audio clips from CKNW’s Owl Prowl, 1961. Photo Rene Castellani and Jack Cullen (courtesy Colleen Hardwick).

I’ve had a fascination with the Castellani murder case ever since I first saw the true-crime exhibit at the Vancouver Police Museum in the 1990s. This crime had all the ingredients for a movie of the week: an adulterous middle-aged celebrity husband, who, rather than fight for divorce and face the wrath of the Catholic Church, decided to poison his wife with arsenic so that he could marry Lolly Miller, the 25-year-old receptionist.

Esther and Rene Castellani married in 1946 they were both 21. Photo courtesy Jeannine Castellani

I’ve read various accounts of the murder over the years, even written about it myself in At Home with History, grounding the story in the house, or in this case, the duplex, where most of the poisoning took place. Occasionally, I’ve told the story on the radio, usually around Halloween, and then, in 2011, I wrote a post about it on my blog Every Place Has a Story.

2092 West 42nd, where Esther Castellani was slowly poisoned to death in 1965. Eve Lazarus photo, 2018

The blog post changed everything, because, fortunately for me, I had made a mistake.

Debbie Miller wrote to tell me that Lolly had a son called Don, not a daughter, as I had written. And her husband Don would very much like to find Jeannine Castellani, because he’d been searching for her for nearly 50 years. I wrote back and thanked Debbie and said I would also like to find Jeannine.

And then, in June 2017, Jeannine found me.

Jeannine and her daughter Ashley came to my book launch for Blood, Sweat, and Fear at the Vancouver Police Museum. The museum had put their true crime exhibits in the morgue which was next to the autopsy suite and where we had set up our cash bar, and where Esther’s body had once lain.

I told Jeannine that Don had been looking for her, and she got quite emotional. She had also been searching for Don for nearly half a century.

So why write a book about what is already one of the most sensational and well-known murders in Vancouver’s history?

Well, for several reasons. It took place in the 1960s—a decade of incredible change. On the one hand, you have conservative, small-town Vancouver and two juries that convicted Rene mostly because of his infidelity. On the other hand, you have free love and be-ins, hippies and the Beatles, and a seismic political, cultural, and legal shift happening all over North America.

It was the era of Mad Men, of gin breakfasts and martini lunches­. It was a 19th century-style murder solved by a 20th century doctor and old-fashioned police work.

And it was a time when the death sentence was still on the table.

Esther and Jeannine ca.1964. Courtesy Jeannine Castellani

But, most of all, I wanted to write the book and now create this podcast to tell Jeannine’s story.

SHOW NOTES

Sponsors: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours and Erin Hakin Jewellery

Music:   Andreas Schuld ‘Waiting for You’

Intro and voiceovers:   Mark Dunn

Interviews: former CKNW staffers George Garrett and Norm Grohmann; Jeannine Castellani.

Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media

Sources:

Related:

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

The Babes in the Woods Part 1

by Eve Lazarus on December 4, 2020
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The Babes in the Woods case is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park. It is one of Vancouver’s oldest unsolved murder mysteries. This episode is based on a story in Cold Case Vancouver: The city’s most Baffling unsolved murders

This episode is sponsored by Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours. Enter the code ColdCase for 15% off your tickets.

While the murders happened sometime in the 1940s, the story starts in January 1953 when a Vancouver Parks Board employee stepped on a skull in a remote area of Stanley Park. When he scraped back the leaves, he found bones covered by a woman’s coat, two children’s flying helmets, shoes, a lunch box, and the murder weapon—a hatchet.

The hatchet at the Vancouver Police Museum. Eve Lazarus photo

No one had reported missing children.

The Babes in the Woods is Vancouver’s own Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, a dark edge to the city’s beloved Stanley Park, but with an unsatisfying, inconclusive ending.

It’s also one of the most botched.

1953 crime scene photo. Courtesy Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Before DNA profiling it was extremely difficult to determine sex from skeletal remains, and even though the clothes suggested otherwise, a pathologist determined that the bones belonged to a boy and a girl. For the next half century police searched school records and followed up on tips in an attempt to identify a missing brother and sister.

Police theorized that the children were taken to the park for a picnic by their mother, who then smashed in their heads with an axe, and now unencumbered, went off to have a good time.

There are more than a few problems with this theory. The children were covered with a woman’s coat, more an act of compassion than one of cold-blooded murder. And post-war Vancouver was a brutal place. There was rampant homelessness, transients and violence—especially against women. Women lost their jobs when the men came back from the war. There was no safety net and those post-war years saw a number of cases where desperate women killed their children and then committed suicide.

In 1996, when DNA profiling became part of the forensics toolkit, investigators reopened the file. A UBC scientist extracted DNA from the teeth and soon realized that he was dealing with two boys—not a brother and a sister. This information changed the course of the investigation.

In the next episode: Babes in the Woods Part 2: Kat Thorsen and I take a walk out to the secret spot in Stanley Park where the skeletons of the Babes in the Woods were first discovered. I talk to the VPD Inspector who was in charge of the file in 2015 about how he furthered the investigation, and I talk to the coroner, who reveals an exciting new development.

Show Notes

Intro:       Mark Dunn

Music:      Lament by Myuu, The Dark Piano

Sponsor:   Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours

Promo:      Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance

Guest:        Retired VPD Detective Sergeant Brian Honeybourn

Graphic:    Courtesy Kat Thorsen

Sources:

Lazarus, Eve. Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015

The Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Vancouver Police Department annual reports 1940s and ’50s

Retired VPD officer Ron Amiel

Vital Statistics – death certificates

Georgia Straight

Globe and Mail

Ottawa Citizen

Province

Vancouver Sun

West Ender

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

The Kosberg Axe Murders

by Eve Lazarus on November 20, 2020
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On December 10, 1965, Tom Kosberg, 17 hacked up his mother, father and four siblings with a double-bladed axe 

The Kosberg Axe Murders podcast is based on a story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Kosberg house at Main and 22nd Avenue. Eve Lazarus photo, 2020
Mount Pleasant:

When police arrived at the house in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant area on December 10, 1965, the first thing they saw was the bright red Santa Claus painted on the front window. They kicked in the front door and found the bodies of Osborne and Dorothy Kosberg, Barry, 15, Gayle, 11, Vincent, 2 and Marianne, 13 clinging to life.  They had all been  hacked to bits with a double-bladed axe. Only the baby survived.

The axe was found leaning against the kitchen stove. Crime scene photo courtesy Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Tom, 17, had a history of mental illness, but no one could imagine him plotting a murder, let alone killing his own family.

On the night of the murder, he bought a bottle of 25 sleeping pills from a local drugstore. He made chocolate milkshakes for his mother, for Florence a family friend who was visiting, and for his two brothers and two sisters.

Courtesy Vancouver Police Museum and Archives
Watching Television:

The family was watching television. Florence sat at one end of the chesterfield while Tom sat at the other reading a book. She remembers Dorothy saying, “I didn’t know that I was that tired.” Florence then fell asleep and woke up about 11:00 pm. Tom suggested she stay the night, but she called a taxi and left. While the rest of his family slept, Tom waited up for Osborne who was working a late shift as a truck driver for Allied Heat and Fuel. He made his Dad a milkshake. When everyone was asleep he went to the basement to fetch the double-bladed axe.

Neatly dressed and calm:

Tom drove off in the family’s 1954 sedan and ran it into a power pole. Police described him later as “neatly dressed” and “calm”.

The court ruled that Tom was not guilty by reason of insanity and shipped him back to Riverview.

Courtesy Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Ten years later Tom was released. He married and worked for BC Children’s Hospital for the next 30 years. He died in 2016.

In the podcast, criminologist Heidi Currie helps me explore the differences and similarities between the Kosberg murders, the Blackman family murders in Coquitlam in 1983, and the murder of Tim McLean by Vince Li on a Greyhound bus in 2008. All three killers were found not criminally responsible for their actions and released in less than 10 years.

One of the victims removed from the family home. Province, December 11, 1965
Show Notes

Intro:       Mark Dunn

Music:      Bittersweet by Myuu, The Dark Piano

Sponsor: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours

PSA:   Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Promo:      Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance

Guest:        Dr. Heidi Currie, criminologist

Sources:

The Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Vital Statistics – death certificates

Lazarus, Eve. Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020

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

Alice: A Murder Mystery

by Eve Lazarus on September 14, 2019
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In her day job, my friend Cat Rose works as a Crime Analyst for the Vancouver Police Department. In her spare time, she volunteers at the Vancouver Police Museum. Cat has a Masters in Public History and she has used her background to conceive, research and produce Alice: A Murder Mystery which debuts in time for Halloween. (The script was co-written with Bill Allman).

Cat Rose inside the hidden courtyard in Chinatown

This 90-minute piece of immersive theatre is set in the 1930s and takes place in the heritage building that houses the Police Museum on East Cordova Street.

Eight actors have been cast in a variety of character roles and they will interact with the audience—a maximum of 25—and be there to drop hints about the murderer and help move the story along.

While the play is fictional, it’s loosely based on the Janet Smith unsolved murder and takes place mostly in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Unlike the real Janet Smith, Alice was involved in all sorts of scandals from Vancouver’s crime history including rum running and connections to the Chinese underworld. Cat has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure its historical accuracy.

Gambling in Chinatown, 1950. Courtesy Vancouver Public Library #41613A

“I just find Chinatown and the early Chinese community so interesting,” she says. “We need to stop only telling stories about prominent white people. The Chinese have always been a huge part of the city of Vancouver—why don’t we know about more of them?”

When Cat was researching the story, she discovered that one of the character’s—Jim “Salt Water” Goon had a connection to the Janet Smith murder. The problem was, there just wasn’t a lot known about him. After a lot of digging, she was able to find out that Goon was a real bad ass working both criminals and cops. “He was running dope, running girls, running gambling dens. He was convicted of attempted murder and got out of jail in five months, and then in 1920 he was named City Police Chinese Inspector.” This was an early euphemism for a paid informant. The first Chinese VPD officer wasn’t hired until the 1970s.

To add to the realism of the play, audience members will be part of a coroner’s inquest that investigates the murder. It’s held in the actual Coroner’s Court, which has recently undergone a massive makeover. They will listen to a 1930s-style radio broadcast recorded by Jeff Hyslop for the play, and see physical evidence in the form of police documents and crime scene photos.

The audience also has a role to play. Six of the characters are based on real people. Cat’s research found that Salt Water Goon knew VPD Inspector John Jackson and it was likely the Inspector was taking payoffs. “That was my favourite thing that I learned while doing this. I needed a gangster and a dirty cop, and by pure coincidence they were actually scheming together in real life!”

Coroner’s Court courtesy Vancouver Police Museum

The great thing about writing history is that fact is always stranger than fiction.

For details about dates and ticket prices, please visit the Vancouver Police Museum.

Glen McDonald: Vancouver’s Colourful Coroner

by Eve Lazarus on January 19, 2019
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Glen McDonald was easily Vancouver’s most colourful coroner. He called himself the “Ombudsman of the Dead” and served from 1954 to 1980.

Glen McDonald 1979
Glen McDonald, Vancouver Sun 1979

If I was able to go back in time and choose six people to interview, Glen McDonald would be high up on the list. I got to know him while I was researching Murder by Milkshake, and his 1985 book How Come I’m Dead? has a prime position on the book shelf above my desk.

McDonald was Vancouver’s coroner from 1954 to 1980. Unlike the star of CBC’s new show Coroner, McDonald was not a doctor. In BC—and I’m quoting from a government job posting—there are 32 full-time coroners with backgrounds in law, medicine, investigation and journalism.

Ombudsman of the Dead:

McDonald, who was a lawyer and a judge, called himself the “Ombudsman of the Dead.” He told people it was his job to find the cause of death in order to help the living, and he did this from his morgue on East Cordova Street (now the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives) where an average of 1,100 bodies passed through each year. He smoked 50 cigarettes a day, drank beer and spirits kept beside forensic specimens in an office fridge, and conducted one or two inquests a week that looked into deaths ranging from shootings and stabbings to drug overdoses and traffic accidents.

You can visit McDonald’s old morgue and Coroner’s Court at the Vancouver Police Museum, 240 East Cordova Street. Courtesy VPM
Finding Cause of Death:

His job was to assemble a jury and determine whether death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. After he retired, he admitted to occasionally lying to priests so that his Catholic victims could be buried in consecrated ground. He’d say he hadn’t reached a conclusion. The funeral would go ahead as if the death was not a suicide and McDonald would sign the death certificate when the body was safely in the ground.

He said his job was to find the cause of death in order to protect the living, and he investigated everything from deaths by shooting, stabbing, and strangulation, to poisoning, suicide, drug overdoses, and death by traffic, rail and boat accidents.

Ironworkers Memorial Bridge

He officiated over the Inquest of 18 men who were killed when the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed while under construction in 1958. And, he was in charge when CP Flight 21 blew up over the BC Interior killing all 52 people on board in 1965.

One of his more famous cases was the death of Aussie actor Errol Flynn in 1959. Flynn, 50, was in Vancouver with his 17-year-old girlfriend trying to sell his yacht Zaca to a local millionaire. He had a heart attack while at a party in the West End and ended up in McDonald’s morgue. (The full story is in Sensational Vancouver).

Murder by Milkshake:

The first time McDonald came across death by arsenic poisoning was in 1965 with the murder of Esther Castellani. The first thing he did was install himself in the science section of the VPL and read everything he could find about arsenic poisoning. As he wrote in How Come I’m Dead? he suspected that Rene Castellani had been at the library some months before, doing exactly the same thing.

My favourite McDonaldism is when he gained national notoriety for calling Bingo Canada’s most dangerous sport. He was referring to the number of seniors who were run over while walking to their weekly games.

McDonald died 23 years ago—on January 23, 1996. He was 77.

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

The life’s work of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator

by Eve Lazarus on February 10, 2018
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In July 2016, several large cardboard boxes filled with photographs, clippings, forensic samples, and case notes pre-dating 1950, and thought to be thrown out decades ago, were discovered in a garage on Gabriola Island. They form the basis of Blood, Sweat, and Fear: the story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator. 

Crime Scene:

I first “met” Inspector John F.C.B. Vance when I was writing Cold Case Vancouver. He turned up at a crime scene in Chapter 1, the murder of Jennie Eldon Conroy, a 24-year-old war worker who was beaten to death and dumped at the West Vancouver Cemetery. It turned out that Vance wasn’t actually a police officer–he ran the Police Bureau of Science for the Vancouver Police Department, and his cutting-edge work in forensics solved some of the most sensational cases in the first half of the last century.

Unfortunately, Jennie’s wasn’t one of them.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear
Vance examines a spent bullet through a comparison microscope in 1932. Courtesy Vance family
240 Cordova:

For most of his career, Vance worked out of 240 East Cordova Street, the building that now houses the Vancouver Police Museum. With their help, I was able to track down a couple of Vance’s grandchildren. Janey and David remembered that J.F.C.B.—as Vance was known in the family—had packed up several cardboard boxes full of photographs, clippings, and case notes from dozens of cases when he retired in 1949. He took them with him when he moved in 1960, but no one had seen them for years, and it was thought that they’d been thrown out. And then, in July 2016, more than half a century after Vance’s death, the boxes were found in another grandchild’s garage on Gabriola Island.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear
Vancouver was the only police department in Canada that had a forensic scientist on staff and one of the few police departments in North America to use forensics in criminal investigations. Forensic samples found in one of the boxes
Jennie Conroy:

Incredibly, when Janey opened the first box she found a large, tattered envelope labelled Jennie Eldon Conroy murdered West Vancouver, Dec 28, 1944. Inside there were smaller envelopes marked with the VPD insignia and filled with hair and gravel samples from the crime scene, an autopsy report, crime scene photos, and several newspaper clippings.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear
Vance’s science was so successful that in 1934 there were seven attempts on his life. This was a home made bomb sent to Vance’s lab through the general police mail

Vance was skilled in serology, toxicology, ballistics, trace evidence and autopsy. He was a familiar face at crime scenes and in the courtroom, and was called the Sherlock Holmes of Canada by the international media. Yet few people have heard of him.

Hopefully that will change with the publication of Blood, Sweat, and Fear, but best of all, all those boxes, the crime scene photos, the case notes, even Vance’s personal diary, are now with the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives. They’ll be properly processed, cared for, and eventually made available to the public.

Related:  Blood, Sweat and Fear: A True Crime Podcast

Blood,Sweat, and Fear
Crime scene photo from the murder of two police officers in Merritt, BC in 1934.
Blood, Sweat and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance is now a 12-episode True Crime podcast 

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

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