Dead Ends (6 page)

When he discovered that crime paid better, Mulvahill took to it with more enthusiasm than success.

The low point came in June 1989, when staff at a Vancouver McDonald's spotted him heading into the washroom at closing time. They called police, who found Mulvahill weeping in a toilet stall. He had a loaded shotgun and a balaclava, but told officers he hadn't been able to decide whether to rob the place or kill himself.

By the beginning of 1990, Mulvahill was a twenty-year-old with no skills, big dreams, and a willingness to break the law. He just didn't know what crime to choose.

As winter turned to spring, Mulvahill and a friend spent afternoons in the Vancouver Public Library, where he read up on kidnappings. Easy money, he decided.

Once he had the crime, he began to research potential victims, and Jimmy Pattison topped the list.

Not surprisingly. Pattison was a British Columbia legend. He started as a champion car salesman, talked his way into a
loan to buy his own dealership, and motivated staff by firing the salesman who sold the fewest cars every month.

By 1990, he had built the largest private business in the province, capturing a major grocery chain, an airline, radio stations, and more. And the sixty-two-year-old Pattison had a big public profile, the man who made Expo 86 a success.

Mulvahill read Pattison's recent autobiography. He learned about Cynthia Kilburn, his thirty-year-old daughter, and found her address in a city directory in the library's reference section.

He worked on his plan. But Mulvahill was not good on details and had a problem with impulse control. His scheme was both bold and inept, a terrible combination. He didn't have a gang.

He pitched the idea to friend Jason Manchester, who said no.

So Manchester was surprised when Mulvahill asked him again, with a ransom note already typed. Manchester still said no, but, a week before the planned kidnapping, he introduced Mulvahill to nineteen-year-old Christian Snelgrove, a community college student with a full-time job and a stable family.

“I'm in,” Snelgrove instantly said.

His job was to recruit three helpers to grab Cynthia Kilburn and hold her until the ransom was paid. He asked Nanami Kataoka to recruit the kidnappers from gang kids in North Vancouver, toughish teens with no real criminal experience.

Within days they were ready. A twenty-year-old mastermind. A nineteen-year-old second-in-command. Two armed teens—sixteen and seventeen—to do the kidnapping. A sixteen-year-old in charge of holding the hostage. No real plan.

It seemed more like the plot for a comedy movie than a serious crime.

But there was nothing funny about it for Cynthia Kilburn. Kilburn, her four-year-old twins, and the entire family were all about to face fourteen hours of terror.

Kilburn and her husband, Allan, lived a normal life, despite the family wealth, in a quiet North Vancouver neighbourhood. Neighbours had no idea she was rich enough to be a potential kidnap target.

Until December 21, 1990. Vancouver was suffering through a record cold snap, and Kilburn was fighting an illness, hoping to be better for a family Christmas. She had stayed in bed in the morning gloom, resting while keeping an ear out for her four-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.

The boy first noticed the two strangers coming up the front walk.

Kilburn answered the door. As soon as she saw the two young men standing there, clothes arranged to hide their faces, she tried to slam it closed.

But they pushed in, brandishing handguns. Kilburn was knocked down. The second man in pointed his gun at her and told her to co-operate or be shot. They bound her with tape, hands behind her back, ankles together, mouth and eyes covered. She struggled to breathe.

She heard her daughter calling for daddy. Then the children were dragged to an upstairs bathroom, bound hand and foot, and left alone. The phones were left off the hook.

The kidnappers dragged Kilburn to a stolen car, leaving a ransom note stuck to the front door. They wanted $200,000 right away, and $8.5 million for her return.

“If you call the police, she dies. If any media reports, she dies. Any slowdown in delivering the money, she dies. She is buried seven feet down in a wooden crate. She has three days' supply of bread and water.”

The two kidnappers delivered Kilburn, still bound and blindfolded, to the sixteen-year-old accomplice. Kilburn struggled to breathe in the darkness, fearing she would die in the car.

The sixteen-year-old, not knowing what else to do, drove her to Manchester's parents' house, where he lived with his mom and dad.

Manchester had never agreed to be part of the kidnapping. He let them in, half-dragging Kilburn, who was bound and wrapped in a sleeping bag. But he was furious, calling Mulvahill and demanding to know “What the hell is going on.”

Mulvahill and Snelgrove came and moved Kilburn—“the bundle,” they called her—to the basement of another North Vancouver house.

By then, Kilburn's mother, Mary Pattison, had grown concerned because she couldn't reach her daughter. She sent an employee to check the house. The note was discovered on the door.

And things began to move quickly, strangely—and terrifyingly.

The Pattison family called police and gathered together. They feared Cynthia was buried alive. Jimmy Pattison arranged to get $200,000 from his bank.

Meanwhile, Mulvahill made calls to Pattison's direct line, Allan Kilburn's office, then his cellphone. He said the gang had Cynthia Kilburn, and threatened to kill her unless his instructions were followed. Around 8:15 p.m., he called Allan Kilburn's cellphone—the calls now being recorded by police—and gave instructions for the drop of the first $200,000.

The ransom drop is critical, the chance for police to grab the kidnapper and find out where the victim is being held.

Mulvahill told Kilburn to put the money in a red sports bag and take it to a specific entrance in the giant Hudson's Bay store downtown. There would be a note under a red tablecloth just inside the door, Mulvahill said. Kilburn had thirty seconds to follow the instructions and drop off the money.

It worked. Kilburn left the bag under a table, as the note demanded. Mulvahill watched him leave, stuffed the red bag full of money in a backpack, and ran into the attached mall.

Mulvahill imagined plainclothes police everywhere in the crowds of Christmas shoppers. He ducked into a washroom, then the posh Four Seasons Hotel. He called Kilburn repeatedly, telling him to call the police off or else.

In fact, police staking out the drop had already lost Mulvahill.

In North Vancouver, Snelgrove and Kataoka, watching Kilburn, were getting edgy because they hadn't heard from Mulvahill. The pair became convinced they had been double-crossed.

So they decided to let Cynthia Kilburn go, alternately apologizing to her and threatening and making excuses. Kataoka told her the original plan had been to take her on a plane and administer a heroin overdose.

The two teens argued about where to drop Kilburn, and then agreed to leave her near one of her friends' houses in North Vancouver. The van stopped, and Kilburn had one more moment of terror as she waited to be shot. Instead, Snelgrove apologized and said he got greedy. Kataoka walked her a short distance, then told her to run.

Barefoot, still in the housecoat she was wearing fourteen hours earlier, Kilburn clawed the tape from her eyes and ran toward the front door of her friend's house.

The prospects of an $8.5 million total ransom vanished.

But incredibly, a band of hapless amateurs had scored $200,000, and got away with it.

Not for long though. There is a sequence in the mob movie
Goodfellas
in which Robert De Niro kills his accomplices in a big heist because they ignore his order not to go out and show off their new money.

Mulvahill, Snelgrove, and the rest—together happily, despite their earlier rifts—must not have seen the movie. On Saturday, they hired a white stretch limousine and headed out to spend some of their newfound wealth.

Amazingly, they made the downtown Hudson's Bay store one of their first stops. Security staff had all been given a description of Mulvahill based on the police surveillance when he picked up the ransom. An alert guard did a double take when he saw Mulvahill, then called police with a description of the limo.

Every officer in the city was told to watch for the limo and the gang. And soon police saw the car heading into a shopping centre in West Vancouver.

Mulvahill was arrested as he took seven new suits in to a tailor for alterations. The limo driver said they had visited four shopping centres, and the gang had filled the roomy trunk with clothes, jewelry, and guitars, handing $1,000 to a panhandler at one stop.

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Seven people were arrested that day—all five people directly involved and a couple of hangers-on charged with possession of stolen property.

Mulvahill and Snelgrove faced the most serious charges—kidnapping, extortion, and confinement of Kilburn's twin children. They pleaded not guilty, but two days into the trial, admitted their guilt.

Mulvahill got life for kidnapping and extortion, and seven years for confining the children. Snelgrove was sentenced to thirteen years for each of the kidnapping and extortion charges, and seven years for his role in the twins' confinement. Both appealed, and Mulvahill's life terms were reduced to eighteen years and Snelgrove's sentences reduced from thirteen to ten years. The others, judged minor players, got shorter sentences.

For the Kilburns and the Pattisons, everything changed. Vancouver was no longer such a safe place. A knock on the door could bring a wave of terror.

Jimmy Pattison said the family now worried any time someone was late for a gathering, or didn't answer the phone. “We are constantly looking over our shoulders for suspicious cars, people and circumstances.” The family introduced security measures they had never considered necessary. Vancouver changed a little, for the worse.

The criminals were dim-witted bunglers, said British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ken Meredith during sentencing. Their plan was laughable.

But that problem made them more dangerous, he said. “The more harebrained the scheme the greater the risk to life.”

The penitentiary system is supposed to make people “penitent” and ready to live better lives.

It didn't work for the kidnappers.

Naname Kataoka served three years for his role in the kidnapping. Once released, he renewed his gang ties, linking up
with the feared United Nations gang. In 2009, he was found shot to death in a parking lot in Buenos Aires.

Christian Snelgrove served a little more than three years, and at first did well on release. But heroin, then crack, called him, and in 2003 he broke into his ex-common-law partner's home, threatened her and their baby, and forced them into his car. He was sent back to prison for four years.

And Shayne Mulvahill turned into the poster boy for the failure of the penal system. He was released on day parole in 1998. But he had heard jailhouse gossip about a convicted cocaine dealer who was about to come into some big money. So Mulvahill hatched a plan to kidnap the man's adult son. It all went wrong, the victim escaped, and Mulahill was sent back to jail with another twenty-year sentence.

Jimmy Pattison's success continued. In 2013, he was Canada's richest man. But he still lost something that money couldn't buy on that day before Christmas in 1990.

B
oston Bruin Marty McSorley's crime lasted only seconds. It took place under bright white
TV
lights, in front of 14,000 eyewitnesses, and left Vancouver Canuck Donald Brashear unconscious and convulsing on the ice in Vancouver's
GM
Place.

And, at least briefly, it sparked a critical look at hockey's unwritten code of violence and intimidation.

McSorley had already earned millions of dollars fighting other hockey players by the time he squared off against Brashear on February 21, 2000.

From his first days with junior hockey Belleville Bulls, McSorley understood his role. When hockey's code—or a coach—said it was time to fight, he jumped over the boards, dropped his gloves, and started punching.

His willingness—and fearsomeness—carried him to the
NHL
. Without his ability to fight, McSorley acknowledged, he never would have even made a Junior A team, the first rung on the long ladder to the top.

But an enforcer's career is tenuous. Younger, stronger, fiercer players are always arriving. Like gunslingers in the Wild West, they know that beating the best is the way to make their mark—and the big money.

By the 1999 season, McSorley's career was waning. The year before, for the first time, he had lost more fights than he had won. He was thirty-six—old in a trade that requires you to absorb hundreds of punches to the head and square off in brawls with other men, facing not just physical punishment
but humiliation in front of thousands of people who cheer as you are battered.

McSorley had been released by his last two teams before he signed with the Boston Bruins that year. His annual salary, almost $2 million in 1995, had fallen to around $600,000. His glory years as Wayne Gretzky's on-ice bodyguard in Edmonton and Los Angeles and his two Stanley Cup wins were in the past.

McSorley had worked to become a more complete hockey player. He was a respected representative in the players' association. His flowing golden hair and good looks made him a fan favourite.

But he was paid to be a tough guy, and after 274
NHL
fights, McSorley still had something to prove.

Brashear's career was going the other way. He had only made it as a full-time
NHL
player four years earlier with the Montreal Canadiens, but his salary had already climbed from $170,000 to $750,000. He was feared, and the future looked bright as long as he kept on winning fights.