Crimes show us a fascinating world - and ourselves
I was 25 when I spent six months as the police and court reporter for The Red Deer Advocate, and had a glimpse into another world. The stories were intense, tragic, funny, surprising - sometimes all at the same time. The characters, on both sides of the criminal divide, were compelling and complex, the best and worst of humanity on display every day. And the crimes I covered sometimes turned out to reveal a great deal about the rest of us, and the society we live in. The stories in this book span more than 150 years, from the high-profile and infamous to the almost forgotten. British Columbia has a rich tradition of outlaws, wrongdoing and evil. The challenge was narrowing the list to 40 crimes.
It was tempting to leave out people like Clifford Olson as too horrible or well-known. But it has been more than three decades since that summer of terror. We should not forget. I looked for crimes that told us something about ourselves. Just as we should not forget Olson, we should not forget the entrenched racism that allowed a young man to be kidnapped by police agents because he was Chinese. Nor should we fail to recognize our shared role in denying the help that would have kept some of the people in the book from becoming victims, and others from becoming criminals. And mostly I looked for crimes that were just darn good stories. That was the easy part. Bank robbers, con men, killers and thieves lead fascinating, sometimes repellent lives, in a world most of us rarely get to see. Paul Willcocks