Dead Ends (9 page)

On Sept. 2, 1913, Bill Miner died in prison at sixty-seven.

His legend lives on.

S
tephen Reid was an outlaw and legend, like Bill Miner. Only a century later.

Miner robbed trains and stagecoaches. Reid robbed banks. A lot of banks.

But Reid, it seemed, left that world. He met the love of his life, a brilliant poet, while he was serving a long prison term. He wrote a fine and successful novel behind bars.

Once he'd done his time, Reid settled into life with his wife and two beautiful daughters in a little house with a tree growing up through the roof, on a saltwater inlet near Victoria. He was a success, a great teacher and fine writer. Funny, wise, calm—someone people wanted to be around.

It was a perfect story. Until one day in June 1999, when it wasn't.

*
  
*
  
*

There is a blurry line between legend and lie.

Stephen Reid's legend had him born in 1950 in Massey, a small Ontario town on the northern shores of Georgian Bay. He was bright, good-looking, an athlete, second of eight children in a solidly middle-class home.

Until suddenly, at sixteen, he decided to hitchhike to Vancouver for the summer, where he was caught with half a joint and tangled up in the courts. He got back too late for high school that year, worked in the mine where his father was the office manager, but didn't much like mining. Ended
up in Toronto using hard drugs and robbing, first corner stores and then banks. Jailed at twenty-two, he escaped by persuading two guards accompanying him on a day pass to stop for Chinese food and disappearing out the washroom window. Made his way to Ottawa, and met charming crime kingpin Paddy Mitchell.

Read it quickly and it almost makes sense. But the legend leaves out some parts of the story. Dark parts, things harder to leave behind than the thrill of robbing banks.

Reid did meet Paddy Mitchell, a charismatic and creative crook who had the ability to find good scores and bring the right people together to make them happen.

Mitchell was ten years older, a family man, wildly social. But he and Reid, big moustaches and bigger smiles, were an amazing team. Especially when they hooked up with Lionel Wright, the introverted, thoughtful loner who could plan any crime down to the last detail.

Their first crime together was an April 1974 robbery that saw them walk away with $700,000 worth of gold from a poorly guarded Air Canada freight storage building at the Ottawa airport. It was the kind of score that makes crime seem a very good career choice.

Reid hardly had time to enjoy the money. He was still a wanted man after his Chinese restaurant escape. In December, police grabbed him and he was sent back to jail after fourteen months on the street.

Wright and Mitchell joined Reid behind bars a little more than a year later, locked up on drug trafficking conspiracy charges.

But the trio didn't stick around for long. Wright escaped within months. It took Reid longer, but in August 1979, he persuaded another guard accompanying him on a day pass to let him have a forbidden meal, fish and chips this time. Once again, he said he was going to the restaurant washroom and never came back.

Three months later, Mitchell steeped cigarette tobacco in water to brew a nicotine broth in his cell. He drank it, went for a run in the prison yard, and collapsed with the symptoms
of a heart attack. The prison rushed him by ambulance to the nearest hospital. Wright and Reid were waiting. They directed it to a side entrance, pulled guns on the attendants, and carried Mitchell away.

The trio fled to Florida, and then California and the West. And they started getting serious about robberies.

Reid and Wright studied the target banks and department stores, the local police patrols, escape routes, and when there was likely to be the most money. They stole getaway cars and used elaborate disguises to distract witnesses, like Richard Nixon masks or dramatic makeup jobs. Wright even tracked garbage pickup schedules and made sure to get rid of evidence just before a truck was due to empty the Dumpsters.

And Reid wore a stopwatch around his neck, a reminder to stay in the bank less than ninety seconds. They became the Stopwatch Gang, high on the
FBI
's Most Wanted list.

It worked for a while. Reid, Mitchell, and Wright were armed robbery champions, flush with cash, living the high life. They had a hideaway in Sedona, Arizona, amid the stunning red rock towers and the vortexes of spiritual energy that attracted New Age seekers.

But less than two years after they began their U.S. crime wave, the
FBI
busted Reid and Wright in Sedona in October 1981.

They had made crime pay and stolen millions. And, as much through good luck as good management, they had never shot anyone.

Reid was sentenced to ten years on December 15, 1981, and sent back to a Canadian penitentiary—Millhaven Institute, a violent maximum-security prison—in May 1983. He started writing a novel based on his life in crime, which made its way to poet Susan Musgrave, the writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo.

She liked the writing; they fell in love and were married inside a maximum security prison outside Vancouver in 1986. Reid's novel,
Jackrabbit Parole
, came out the same year and to great reviews.

A year later, Reid was paroled.

It should have been the best of all possible times. Reid was only thirty-six. He was charming, amusing, calming, a brilliant writing instructor and a powerful and witty writer, an effective advocate for prisoners, a champion of restorative justice.

Musgrave was, he says, “one of the most beautiful and interesting women on the planet.” Their children—her daughter from a previous marriage, Charlotte, and the daughter they had together, Sophie—were “two incredible pieces of magic.” He was sought after, embraced by the writing community (though maybe trapped too much in the role of outlaw).

*
  
*
  
*

But it wasn't enough. All that light couldn't penetrate the dark places.

That legend of the young man who went from athlete and student to bank robber in barely a teenage summer left out a chapter. It left out Dr. Paul, the pedophile who introduced Reid to morphine and money and sex and betrayal when he was just eleven.

It left out the dance with the drugs that were always waiting for their time to come again.

In the spring of 1999, the drugs were calling. Reid answered.

And within three months, everything had gone wrong. He owed $90,000 for a stupid, botched cocaine deal, with no way to pay. The bill was due, and the people who fronted the cash didn't like excuses.

So on June 9, Reid, in a heroin haze, set out to rob a bank in Victoria's Cook Street Village, a stretch of cute coffee shops and markets a few blocks from the ocean.

It was, Reid says, a crime against crime. No planning. A getaway driver he calls Lintball, a mask that made him look like “bank-robber Barbie,” and four guns, including a Chinese assault rifle. Too long in the bank, no escape route, midmorning traffic.

By the time he left the bank, police were waiting. There was a stupid, dangerous attempt to escape, hanging out the car
window, firing at the pursuing police with a shotgun. Pushing into an apartment with two frightened seniors. Falling asleep on a couch while the police waited to come in.

And, after twelve years, back to the penitentiary, this time on an eighteen-year sentence.

Reid wrote an award-winning book of essays,
A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden
, during this prison term. He served nine years while his daughters grew up, got out on day parole, and was caught with 3,600 contraband cigarettes while driving without a licence. He was sent back to prison.

He was released on day parole again in 2014, a grandfather. Determined, he says, to fall toward grace this time.

M
aybe Johnny Ussher thought the Wild McLean boys—the youngest just fifteen—weren't real outlaws.

Or maybe it was foolish to think a Montreal-raised lawyer's son, an accidental constable in the Canadian West, could deal with the McLeans, products of a hard land and an even harder father.

But when Ussher rode out into the Kamloops country with three other men to arrest the McLean boys on a snowy day in December 1879, he made a fatal mistake.

The McLeans were not ones to go quietly.

While Frank and Jesse James roamed the American midwest, the McLean gang—brothers Allan, Charlie, and Archie, with their friend Alex Hare—were riding British Columbia's northern interior, taking what they wanted, daring any man to stop them, and growing bolder and more dangerous.

They were young. Allan was twenty-five when the gang killed Ussher. Charlie was seventeen, like Alex Hare. Archie was just fifteen.

But they rode the hills and grasslands around Kamloops and into the Cariboo like outlaw lords. If they were thirsty, they took your whiskey. If they liked your horse, they rode away with it. If they were hungry, or wanted guns, you did not want to get in their way.

It was Archie—fifteen and looking younger, with cropped hair and a boy's face, baggy pants held high on his waist with a rope, trying to look tough and win his brothers' respect—who put the bullet into Ussher's head.

The McLean boys were the sons of Donald McLean, a hard man even by the standards of the frontier.

McLean grew up on the Isle of Mull, a windy, wild island off Scotland's west coast. He set out at twenty-eight to find a new life with the Hudson's Bay Company, opening up the Snake River country in Oregon and company outposts in Washington. He was posted to New Caledonia—the British Columbia interior—in 1842. He was thirty-seven.

McLean took to the West. He was a big, handsome, confident red-headed man with a full beard, quick to anger, slow to forgive, and always ready to dispense his own brand of justice. “Club law,” it was called in the Hudson's Bay Company—an immediate, brutal settling of accounts.

When a company aide was killed in the winter of 1849, allegedly by a young Chilcotin Indian named Tlel, McLean joined the party hunting him down. They found Tlel's uncle in a Carrier village near Quesnel, but the uncle said he didn't know where Tlel was.

So McLean shot him dead. Another man, and a baby, died at the hands of the party.

McLean showed no remorse. He wrote to his supervisor about what should be done with Tlel and any accomplices when they were caught: “Hang first, and then call a jury to find them guilty or not guilty.”

But times were changing. McLean's independence and brutality were going out of fashion as ranchers and railway-men and miners replaced the fur traders. And McLean was a difficult man, reluctant to accept authority, even insubordinate. By 1860, he was called to company regional headquarters in Victoria in an attempt to bring him under control. But he was not a man to be controlled, or to live in a place like Victoria, a hardscrabble outpost with dreams of a civilized future.

Within a year, McLean resigned. He returned to a ranch he had established northwest of Cache Creek, on Bonaparte Creek, prospecting for gold and running a roadhouse for travellers on the new Cariboo Road running to the gold boom town of Barkerville.

McLean already had married once, lived with other women, and fathered at least six children by the time he was posted to New Caledonia.

But in 1854, he had married Sophia Grant, a Native woman from the Colville reservation in Washington, south of the Okanagan. Their first son, Allan, was born a year later. Four other children—two daughters and two sons—followed. McLean was, by all accounts, a loving father to all his children.

But still a hard man. So in 1864, when Tsilhqot'in (Chilcotin) Indians killed nineteen men on crews pushing a road from Bute Inlet through their territories in a series of clashes, McLean was quick to join the colonial government force charged with putting down the uprising.

McLean was forty-nine. Old at the time. But he was ready for battle, and rode out wearing his trademark iron breastplate, designed to block bullets.

It wasn't enough. On July 17, scouting alone in defiance of the orders of the expedition's head, McLean was shot in the back and died.

McLean's family was left in a bad way. Alex was nine, Charlie was two, and Archie just a baby. The £100 pension for his widow, Sophia, would only be paid for five years.

And McLean's sister refused to recognize his marriage to an Indian, and claimed the estate.

Sophia and the children stayed on the ranch for three years, then moved to Kamloops in 1867. They were poor, and outsiders. McLean had made no friends in the Native community by killing Tlel and by his general heavy-handedness. The whites wanted nothing to do with Sophia and McLean's “half-breed” children.

So the boys grew up fast, and hard. As soon as they were able, they signed on as ranch hands, breaking horses, moving cattle—anything to get by. They lived in the saddle, slept where they could.

And, with each year, they shed a few more bonds of civilization. Work was scarce in the Kamloops region by the 1870s, when the gold boom faded. Especially for young men—or boys—like the McLeans.

So the brothers, along with Alex Hare, chose crime—stealing horses and cattle, guns and ammunition, food and anything else they wanted. If you didn't like it, they would fight you, or beat you.

There is freedom in being an outlaw, and a great sense of power. The McLeans grew bolder, their crimes more blatant.

And why not? The land was vast, and many people made their own rules.

John Ussher was the constable and jailer in Kamloops, as well as a farmer and government agent. The jail was a makeshift building that couldn't hold anyone who didn't want to be held. There was no real law.

But the Wild McLeans were going too far—stealing too boldly, challenging anyone in the way. They even threatened the life of John Andrew Mara, the powerful member of the legislative assembly for the region and owner of sprawling ranchland, claiming he had seduced their sister Annie, fathered her child, and abandoned her.