Innholdsfortegnelse for 58.4 Winter 2025 i British Columbia History

True crime gets a bad rap, and often that’s justified. With the proliferation of sensational podcasts, social media, YouTube, and documentaries, violence appears to be all around us. But bringing attention to old cases also brings renewed focus, raises awareness, can prompt new information, and in a best-case scenario, solve unsolvable crimes. According to a research outfit called Digital i, in 2024 Canadians watched more true crime on Netflix than did subscribers in any other country. And, while our fascination with true crime looks to be on the rise, it’s nothing new; we’ve always been attracted to the dark side. We’ve just moved on from public hangings, detective magazines, and early film noir, to Truman Capote’s 1965 book In Cold Blood, which imbued the genre with a certain amount of…

Only seven years after the 1907 anti-Asian race riots destroyed parts of Vancouver’s Chinatown and Japantown, another violent incident sent shockwaves through the early Chinese community. This time, however, the protagonists were not an angry mob: They were a 31-year-old White society lady named Clara Millard and a 16-year-old Chinese houseboy known as Jack Kong (a.k.a. John or Jong Yew Kong). The grisly details of their clash dominated English and Chinese local newspaper headlines for almost two months, and the story quickly spread across Canada. More importantly, the deadly altercation would harm the livelihoods of hundreds of other Chinese servants working in private homes, hotels, and restaurants, and would help fuel a new wave of vigilante attacks on the Chinese community. The participants Jack Kong was 13 when he landed…

I first “met” Inspector Vance when I was writing Cold Case Vancouver.1 I was researching the story of Jennie Eldon Conroy, a 24-year-old war worker who was murdered in 1944, her body dumped at the Capilano View Cemetery in West Vancouver. An article in The Province reported that Inspector J.F.C.B. Vance, police scientist from Vancouver, was at the crime scene and had examined Conroy’s body.2 He determined that she was killed with a small, short-handled hatchet. I was fascinated that we were doing forensics back in the 1940s, and when I finished Cold Case Vancouver, I headed to the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives to try and find out more about him. I learned that Vance started as the City Analyst in 1907. His work primarily consisted of ensuring that…

When my graduate class on the history of photography arrived at the City of Vancouver Archives, five thick leather-bound volumes were laid out on the table. Kira Baker, archivist, unboxed one of the Vancouver Police Department Prisoner’s Record books from the early twentieth century and opened its stiff pages. We could feel the weight of the volume. In that book, spanning 1896–1904, police officers had pasted photographs of people they arrested next to descriptions of their crimes and physical features—the earliest instances of the department grappling with ways photography could document people it suspected of committing crimes and, the department hoped, prevent repeat offences. The photographs had warped each page. As we turned them, they creaked with the heaviness of the images. It was an intimate act to read the…

When I was growing up, my mother told me that my grandfather’s cousin Quan Shim-known to his family as Quan Seem, the spelling which will be used here— died in July 1937 as the result of a vehicle collision in Vancouver. Years later, my aunt gave me a copy of a lawyer’s invoice for work representing my grandfather, Quan Gow, who sued the driver and the car owner for damages to compensate Seem’s wife and children in China. Until the late 1940s, Chinese people were barred from voting, practicing as lawyers, and serving on juries, and in the Great Depression, relief payments for Chinese residents were half of those for White residents. So I was intrigued that a Chinese immigrant found a lawyer and went to court to try to…

If you think that I intend passing the best portion of my life in this infernal hole, and among such a scaley crowd as I at once perceive you are, you have made a thundering mistake, I tell you.”1 Thus began a young cleric’s drunken tirade at a dinner welcoming him and his young, beautiful wife to the “Eden” that was Victoria. Victoria in its early colonial days was a rough-and-tumble supply outpost for men seeking their fortunes in the Gold Rush, which began in 1858. The fledgling city, particularly lower Johnson Street, was rife with saloons, gambling, brothels, and crime reminiscent of the Wild West.2 In fact, in 1860, when the Heather Bell landed at the wharf at Yates Street, Victoria wasn’t a city at all—it wouldn’t be incorporated…

If you are a fan of criminal investigation series and medical movies you’re apt to think that autopsies and human dissection are a very common form of investigation and medical education. TV programs like Murdoch Mysteries frequently feature their protagonists in a morgue examining a dead body, trying to discern a cause of death or discover a clue that will spur them on in the hunt for the killer. Similarly, the medical interns in the series Grey’s Anatomy refine their surgical skills on recently deceased patients, leading to much amusement and calamity. While now considered light entertainment and fit for television, Western society’s general acceptance of human dissection is a relatively new phenomenon, emerging at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the practice of human dissection for the purpose…

Laura is the Identification Specialist Coroner for the BC Coroners Service, responsible for investigating all historical unidentified human remains. In the past several years, the use of genetic genealogy in solving crimes and identifying historical unidentified human remains has exploded in popularity. Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG, or IGG for short) applies a technology that was developed by direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA companies, such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe, for people looking to trace their genetic roots and build a family tree. The first applications of genetic genealogy were by adoptees looking for their genetic relations, but it was only a matter of time before enterprising investigators thought to use the technology to solve forensic mysteries. Since the DTC companies don’t share information, there are a number of open-source databases, such as…

The significance of Xpey’ baskets The cedar basket is a visible reminder of the Coast Salish People’s relationship with the land and all living things—consistent with the belief that all things are sacred. Our mother, Katherine George, from Quw’utsun, owned the basket shown in close-up in the photo. Imagery of mountains, oceans, and trees is woven into the sides, and perhaps the weave itself speaks to balance and supporting each other. Our Ancestors believed in the strength of our relations with the natural and supernatural worlds. Our families created tools and containers that echoed that understanding. Of this relationship, Robert George from Tsleil-Waututh said, “God himself is our culture. He comes to us in visions of love and brotherhood.”2 The Creator also provided songs, ceremonies, prayers to protect and to…