Whodunits are compelling reading when it's a modern crime novel, but when it is a true story and the victim was murdered more than 170 years ago, getting to the culprit is a real page-turner - including the pages of history.
Debra Komar - Dr. Debra Komar, forensic anthropologist - is the real-life sleuth in this aged mystery story. She calls this tale The Bastard of Fort Stikine.
In it, she uses modern biohistory skills (DNA and other molecular material), ballistics, virtual autopsy programs, crime scene reconstruction techniques, written testimony from those close to the events, and a lot of gumshoe detective's dedication.
Her quest was to solve one of Canada's most famous cold cases. It happens to be one of northern B.C.'s earliest of unsolved murders, and while it happened on the west coast in what is now Alaska, it directly links to life in early colonial times in Lheidli T'enneh territory by virtue of it being an internal affair of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).
"I went looking for a case that had never gone through the court system, a true unsolved crime, and in Canada that would fit best with HBC or the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) since they were the dominant companies that did most of the work of colonialism at that time in Canadian history, and that led me to the murder of John McLoughlin Jr.," said Komar. "There is something vaguely Agatha Christie-esque about it: there are about 20 men locked in a fort, all are drunk, all are armed, and all have a possible motive."
She has done this kind of writing before. Her career as a forensic scientist included investigations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and other locations.
Her resume includes 20 years of investigating violent human-rights violations for the United Nations and Physicians For Human Rights, testimony as an expert witness in The Hague and across North America, and she was even hand-picked by then-governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to verify the remains of famed outlaw Billy The Kid (a project that was halted before she could come to a DNA conclusion).
As a writer she has penned numerous academic papers and field articles, she authored the authoritative Forensic Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press), and now has three popular culture books.
The Lynching of Peter Wheeler used modern investigative techniques to posthumously absolve the man hanged in 1896 for the murder of a teenaged Nova Scotia girl - a murder Peter Wheeler did not commit. He was, according to the evidence Komar located, the victim of government-approved ethnic murder. Wheeler was black.
Her book The Ballad of Jacob Peck dug deep into an 1805 murder case ending in the execution of a man clearly, by today's standard of understanding, deranged by mental illness. Complicating that matter was the incendiary sermons of the killer's preacher that arguably triggered the religiously saturated mental episode.
This latest volume adds to a genre Komar seems to have all to herself - historic forensic non-fiction.
"Another benefit of history is, we can look at issues like this from a distance, and that gives us more room to talk about what we can learn for today from the problems and wounds of the past," she said. "When you work criminal cases you do the work the court wants, and when I did academic research I filled in those kinds of gaps in knowledge under the auspices of the institution I worked for, but when I retired from the UN, I wanted to take historic Canadian crime, take modern forensic abilities, but always apply it to a larger question driving it. In this case it was biohistory. It was as much for my own edification as it was to prove things about this case.
"Another thing I wanted to highlight was how we have the ability to solve these historic crimes but the courts don't have the ability to do anything with it, because even knowing who the murderer and conspirators are in this case doesn't change that there can never be a prosecution for it. Everyone is long gone. So when you look at it from that perspective, this topic also caused me to consider what justice really was and how the system we use doesn't actually offer a lot of that."
Inside the thick files of evidence in the Fort Stikine case there were plenty of fingers pointing to the actual killer and those who were complicit in the killing of John McLoughlin Jr. but it was a land without the formal rule of law, back then, and although HBC (especially McLoughlin Sr., one of the company's top officials) did its own internal probe, no one was ever called to account for the murder.
"There was no system coming for you. A lot of guys got away with murder by virtue of the fact there was no justice system to deal with them," Komar said.
In fact, it was in HBC's best interests back then, for recruiting new people to remote trading posts, that the word murder not get out. But that's not to say there wasn't careful chronicling going on.
"John McLoughlin Jr. was a footnote in so many HBC documents, so that's what made me wonder if we could figure it out 170-plus years later," she said. "Some things survived beautifully, some things do not. We call it time's arrow, in forensic archeology, that things deteriorate over time. The gun that was used to kill him was no longer there, but 50 replicas were available.
"Fort Stikine itself was razed, but there are schematics and drawings. I could build a 3D model, place the people in their positions, look at the ballistics, and use the same program I normally would for a modern investigation.
"The HBC archive is a giant thing in Winnipeg. They kept every piece of paper, every object, everything connected to that historic side of the company. God bless 'em, the HBC kept everything it ever touched, and it's sitting in a basement in Winnipeg."
Thrilled to have an historic chapter in its past given the forensic eye by one so accomplished in the field, HBC officials gave Komar wide allowances at the archive facility. She said it was like they wanted to know the truth as much as true-crime literature fans.
Komar also toured northern B.C. getting into the personal space of the mystery.
She will be back again later this month.
She will stop in Prince George for a reading, discussion and book signing at the Prince George Public Library's Bob Harkins Branch on June 25 at 7 p.m.
