Peter B. Smith - Prairie Murders. Mysteries, Crimes and Scandals

Peter B. Smith lives with his wife on Quadra Island, British Columbia, where he retired after a 37-year career as a newspaper crime reporter. He was the crime reporter for The News in Portsmouth, England, for 21 years, where he was on call with all three emergency servicesfire, police and ambulancecovering thousands of stories of death and destruction. After immigrating to Canada in 1987, he was the crime reporter at the Calgary Sun for 16 years, retiring in 2003.

Peter has received numerous accolades, including awards for his coverage of the massacre at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Peter also travelled to England to cover the story of Dr. Harold Shipman, the physician who murdered 216 of his patients.

To satisfy his two main interests in life, sea fishing and stamps, Peter ran a twice-weekly sea-angling column for 10 years in England and wrote more than 600 columns for stamp collectors in the Calgary Sun , spanning 13 years and earning a national Canadian philatelic literary award.

Peters second Canadian true-crime book, CSI Alberta: The Secrets of Skulls and Skeletons , was published in 2009. His previous works include Sea Angling in Southern England and the official history of the Portsmouth (England) Fire Brigade, Go To Blazes , as well as a specialist stamp book called Vanuatus Postal HistoryThe First Decade . Peter is currently working on a history of the postal service, post offices and postmasters on the tiny islands around his Quadra Island home.

I would like to thank the numerous police officers across Alberta with whom I worked during my 16 years as a crime reporter with the Calgary Sun . They helped me with background information on many of the cases in this book. Most of these officers were with the Calgary Police Service. Especially, I want to thank all the secret sources among them, who have had to remain anonymous at all times. You know who you are!

To Calgary staff sergeant George Rocks, who was head of the homicide unit for years and never once lost patience with me bugging him for more information at all hours of the day and night, I thank you for all your help.

Thanks so much to my wife, Amanda, who has endured me talking about murders and dismemberments, and hangings and blood-spatterings, all the time I was writing the book. And thanks for allowing our house to be filled from study to attic with my murder files, notebooks and newspaper cuttings. Her computer skills have been invaluable at times in saving me when parts of the book were in danger of disappearing into cyberspace forever.

I am grateful for the constant help I received from Barbara Van Orden, the librarian at the Quadra Branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library, who found every reference I needed in researching the book. My thanks also to Johnnie Bachusky, a fellow journalist and author, who steered me towards this book. I wish to thank my editor, Dianne Smyth, for reining me in when I was enthusiastically over-loquacious. She made this a better book to read.

Copyright 2009 Peter B. Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, audio recording or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Originally published by Heritage House Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2009 in paperback with ISBN 978-1-926613-71-4.

This electronic edition was released in 2010.

e-pub ISBN: 978-1-926936-26-0

e-PDF ISBN: 978-1-926936-48-2

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

Edited by Lesley Reynolds

Cover photo by Jarek Szymanski/iStockphoto

Heritage House acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), Canada Council for the Arts and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Heritage House
www.heritagehouse.ca

To all my secret sources.
Right on.

Anderson, Frank. A Dance with Death: Canadian Women on the Gallows 17541954 . Saskatoon: Fifth House Ltd., 1996.

Anderson, Frank. The Rum Runners . Edmonton: Lone Pine Publishing, 1991.

Carpenter, Jock. Bootleggers Bride . Canada: Gorman & Gorman, 1993.

Carter, David J. Behind Canadian Barbed Wire . Elkwater: Eagle Butte Press Ltd., 1980. Reprinted as POW Behind Canadian Barbed Wire , 2004.

Gray, James H. Talk to My Lawyer! Great Stories of Southern Albertas Bar and Bench . Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers Ltd., 1987.

It was a shocking moment of revelation for the head of the homicide unit. His detectives had hunted this suspect for months after an old man in Calgary had disappeared and the blood-splashed interior of his house made it obvious hed been murdered right there, then taken away and dumped. Staff Sergeant George Rocks, head of Calgary city homicide unit, told me how hed waited for this moment when his lead detectives would caution and charge suspect Raymond Tudor with murder: When we caught him, hes wearing the victims watch, hes got blood on his cowboy boots, hes got blood on his clothing, hes got the victims car, the victims credit cards and keys, and the victims wallet. He had the victims guns, he had the victims liquor, and he had the victims cigarettes. The evidence was overwhelming.

Rocks recalled how he was monitoring, on close-circuit television, the vital moments in the interview as two homicide detectives, Calvin Johnson and Brent Refvik, were spelling out to Tudor that he was being charged with murder.

Tudor suddenly looked at them with a grin on his face and said, Do you know, you are wearing the ugliest ties Ive ever seen.

Rocks couldnt believe his ears: I sat there thinking, this is insane, absolutely insane. This mans just been told hes being tagged with a murder and hes more interested in joking about the detectives ties.

It gave Rocks an instant insight into the man theyd been hunting. I thought, this man is an animal. This guy has no emotions. This is a cold-blooded killer. He has no value for human life. None.

As Rocks finished relating this moment, he added, By the way, Tudor had one thing right. They were really terrible ties!

CHAPTER

It was an odd request. The Calgary Police Service Crime Stoppers Unit needed an elderly actor who could convincingly play a dead body. The police couldnt turn to modelling agencies because they always sent handsome young men. In the end, a cop offered the unit his dad, Howard Owen. Owen made an excellent corpse, though he later said it had turned his stomach to lie on the floor exactly where an elderly man had been murdered.

Six weeks earlier, on April 29, 1994, a killer had bludgeoned to death retired railwayman Ardie Turner, 77. The murderer had left the body lying on the kitchen floor of the old mans rented tumbledown farmhouse on Highway 797 in the prairie village of Langdon, southeast of Calgary. With the murder still unsolved after six weeks, the Calgary RCMP had opted for a TV re-enactment in the hope that television coverage would spark new information from the public. The crime scene was now bustling with a fake corpse, a fake killer, a camera operator and a film director. It looked like robbery had been the motive, because Ardies meagre pension was missing along with his camera. And, most importantly, his beloved old truck had been driven away by his attacker.