VICTORIA - I didn't know what to expect when I started writing a book on B.C. crimes.
Great stories and wild characters, of course. Heartbreak, sadness and unsolved mysteries.
But I didn't really anticipate how much the 40 crimes, from the 1860s to today, revealed about us. Or how much some crimes haunt us still.
Later this month, for example, Premier Christy Clark will apologize for the hanging of Tsilhqot'in leader Klatasassin and four others in 1864. They had been leaders in 15-week war to keep a road crew - and smallpox - from their land. All told, the war claimed 26 lives.
The war and the executions are a chapter in Dead Ends: BC Crime Stories, the eventual title of my book.
It's an amazing story, one that reveals so much about our past, and its impact on life today. It's a tale of speculators, adventurers, gold rushes, smallpox and resistance. The relationships, dreams and fears in the years before British Columbia was even a province were compelling. It is a great, important story.
And its impact continues. Clark's apology follows a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that found the Tsilhqot'in had never ceded title to their land, never been conquered. Klatasassin's battle was part of that struggle and, 150 years later, the reason his nation has survived with real powers.
We don't know enough, or think enough, about what was an attempt at conquest, or about the resistance.
Our crimes tell so much about who we were. I wrote about Leo Mantha in Dead Ends, the last man hanged in B.C. in 1958. Mantha slashed the throat of his lover in a barracks at the Esquimalt navy base. By that time, Canada was turning away from capital punishment, especially for crimes of passion. But Manthan was gay. No reprieve for him; he was hanged in Oakalla prison.
And about Bob McClelland, a popular Socred cabinet minister who called a Victoria escort agency to hire a prostitute in 1985. Paying for sex wasn't illegal (although it will be under the Harper's government new laws). McLelland was a witness in the trial against the agency.
Socred premier Bill Bennett, though not pleased, didn't drop McClelland from cabinet. The party's caucus chair said it wasn't his role "to poke into other people's business."
How times have changed. Today, Federal Justice Minister Peter MacKay says McClelland and other customers are perverts. The Conservative government's soon-to-be-adopted sex-trade laws would jail people like McLelland for up to five years instead of leaving them at the cabinet table.
And the new laws, according to most experts, would make it even easier for people like Robert Pickton to kill women we don't much care about.
We don't pay enough attention to crime, and especially what we can learn.
And we have done a terrible job of using these great stories - the Wild McLean Brothers, the assassination of Peter Verigin - to bring our history, and today's challenges, alive for students. We have a great way to engage young people in really big issues, and bring the past alive, and we aren't doing a good enough job.
Every one of the crimes I wrote about said something about us. The greed of scam artists, Clifford Olson, the death of NHL player Brian Spencer's dad in a Prince George parking lot, the 1965 explosion that blasted Flight 21 from the sky.
Our crimes define us. We need to understand them.
Paul Willcocks is a journalist, writer and former B.C. legislative columnist. Dead Ends: BC Crime Stories is published by the University of Regina Press.
