Chris Ryan - The Bay Bulls Standoff

The

Bay Bulls

Standoff

______________________________

Chris Ryan

Flanker Press Limited

St. Johns

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ryan, Chris, 1964-, author

The Bay Bulls standoff / Chris Ryan.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77117-355-1 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77117-356-8 (epub).--

ISBN 978-1-77117-357-5 (kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77117-358-2 (pdf)

1. Crockwell, Leo. 2. Gunfights--Newfoundland and Labrador--

Bay Bulls. 3. Arrest (Police methods). 4. Criminals--Newfoundland

and Labrador--Bay Bulls--Biography. 5. Royal Canadian Mounted

Police--Biography. I. Title.

HV6810.B39R93 2014 364.9718 C2014-906803-4

C2014-906804-2

2014 by Chris Ryan

all rights reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic or mechanicalwithout the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Printed in Canada

Cover Design by Graham Blair

Edited by Susan Rendell

Flanker Press Ltd.

PO Box 2522, Station C

St. Johns, NL

Canada

Telephone: (709) 739-4477 Fax: (709) 739-4420 Toll-free: 1-866-739-4420

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Lan dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de lart dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Dedicated to the father of my children,

my best friend, Joey Wakeham (Red)

I started this book in October 2012, twenty-two months after the infamous December 2010 Bay Bulls standoff. The events, people, and conversations in this book are as valid as memory allowed. Some dialogue has been changed, added to, or altered for the benefit of the reader. I hope you enjoy it.

Chris Ryan

Bay Bulls

September 2014

Introduction

There is a folk legend living in Bay Bulls, on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland, by the name of Leo Crockwell. He ranks up there with legends like D. B. Cooper and Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River. This is the story of how Leo Crockwell took on one of the most revered police forces in the world, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and walked away unscathed.

On December 4, 2010, Leo Crockwell, fifty-five, an electrical technician and lifetime resident of Bay Bulls, barricaded himself in his mothers house in Bay Bulls after an altercation with his sister involving a firearm. He held off members of the RCMP for a week. On the eighth day of the standoff, police realized they had been guarding an empty house overnight: Leo Crockwell had escaped.

For eight days my older brother Joe and I and a number of other residents camped out in the local gravel pit in our hometown. We were there out of concern for our friend Leo Crockwell.

The gravel pit is on the south side of Bay Bulls harbour. The Crockwell house is on the north side of the harbour, about half a kilometre from the pit. We picked the gravel pit for our stakeout since it is somewhat elevated in relation to the house, roughly twenty-nine metres above it. Also, at night it is very dark and the area is fairly uninhabited.

That first day, we decided we were in for the long haul. If the standoff went into the night, it would require expensive optics to collect low light and brighten the objects being viewed.

Im recognized as one of the top birdwatchers in the province, being one of fewer than twenty people to document, in their birding careers, nearly 300 or more species of birds. To be a serious birder, you need optics. The optical equipment that I used during this standoff is the best that can be bought. My binoculars are Bushnell Elites, 10 x 42mm. Ten is the magnification number, which means the object being viewed appears ten times closer than with the naked eye. Forty-two is the diameter in millimetres of the objective lens, the glass at the front end of the binoculars. My spotting scope is a Swarovski AT80 HD 30-60x zoom. I shared my equipment with the other watchers: with these optics, people were able to look for hours without tiring or becoming bleary-eyed.

From our vantage point we could see everything that went on, practically every minute of every hour. We could pinpoint each and every sharpshooter. We knew where each of them lay: under a tree, behind a house, or around the corner of a garage. We even came to know which police vehicles would be used during certain routines every day. We could predict which ones would be positioned to stake out the northwest corner of the Crockwell property and which ones would go to Paddys Convenience for sub sandwiches and coffee and to Vincie Cranes North Atlantic gas bar for fish and chips, and for whatever else was needed to feed the officers on duty, day and night.

We would watch them drive from point to point delivering food and coffee to their comrades. All weapons were laid down when these deliveries were made. Who was watching the house during these breaks? Absolutely no one. Sharpshooters would put down their weapons and walk away to the delivery vehicle, sometimes several hundred feet from their post.

At the gravel pit, we also had food delivered to us on occasion. We didnt want to leave our stakeout location and miss any of the action for the want of food, either. My stepdaughter Stacie Wakeham brought food to us a number of times from the house in Witless Bay where I live with her mother, Tina, and her younger sister, Hollie.

Some of our family members, friends, and other residents of Bay Bulls made fun about our spending so much time in the gravel pit, but we were there out of concern for Leo. We wanted front-row seats to the action. We wanted to watch the police in case there were screw-ups: we would be witnesses for Leo. We thought we might have to go to bat for him with the media.

We observed many screw-ups during the standoff, which I sometimes call the Eight-Day Fiasco.

We knew Leo, and we were certain he would not give up easily. He was a very determined individual. This was repeated to the media by members of the Bay Bulls public many times during those eight days. They were told that Leo was not an average person, but an individual with a very high IQ.

So, when Leo made his Houdini-like escape and was located twenty-three kilometres away the day after his seven days of confinement, it verified what wed been saying all week: if you had to choose ten people that were capable of eluding the RCMP, Leo would be at the top of the list.

Chapter 1

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Saturday, December 4

December 4, 2010, was no boring day in Bay Bulls. It was the day on which the most exciting thing happened in our town in living memory.

The standoff started at approximately eleven oclock on that memorable Saturday morning. It was very cold, with the barometer hovering around three degrees Celsius. A northerly wind was blowing forty knots an hour and there was little to no snow on the ground.