Dead Ends (26 page)

They had fun at the wine-tasting, and on excursions to shop for gourmet foods and to Granville Island to wander and
buy pastries. They shared details of their lives. James talked about her son, an aspiring actor, her dreams of more money and a house in Shaughnessy.

Then the curtain rose on Act Two. In March 2008, police created a “scenario.” The new friend took a detour on an afternoon outing, stopping in the giant entrance plaza of the Sheraton Wall Centre Hotel. She parked, illegally, told James to watch the car, and grabbed a package to take into the hotel, returning without it. There was no explanation.

On another outing, the officer showed off three giant bundles of twenty dollar bills—at least $75,000. Soon, as they grew closer, James had to believe her new friend was involved in crime. “She's turned into one of the best friends I've had,” she confided.

Soon, James went from observer to participant. After the pair lunched at the elegant Fish House in Staney Park one day, all bright windows and white linen tablecloths, her friend asked James to keep watch when she met someone. The officer/friend paid James $300.

A line was crossed. Now the goal was to drag James in deeper. Her new friend slowly confessed she was involved with organized crime, helping launder money at Vancouver casinos and selling stolen credit cards. She introduced James to fake gangsters, who talked more about their crimes. They lavished attention on her, paid for expensive meals and wine, and flaunted the money they were making.

But the criminals were all cops, the scenes all elaborately scripted, the cash from police coffers.

By October—nine months after James met her new friend at the spa—police were ready for Act Three. The gang said they needed to settle a score with a man who owed them $300,000, by kidnapping and beating him.

And James, the sixty-nine-year-old suburbanite, didn't blink at the battered victim, his injuries artfully created with makeup.

The deadbeat got off lightly, she told the new friends in crime. She would have cut off his fingers or burned his genitals with a curling iron or put raw meat on his crotch and let dogs at him.

Act Four introduced Mr. Big. The gang offered James a chance to earn a one-third share in a $700,000 score, and sweetened the deal with promises to use connections to help her son's acting career.

But first she had to meet the boss, Mr. Big, in Montreal. That's the decisive moment in the sting, when the suspect—to establish credibility, or out of fear—confesses.

On November 27, James knocked on the door of a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel in Montreal to meet Mr. Big, really an
RCMP
sergeant with a flair for undercover work.

She settled in an off-white loveseat in a dark sweater and grey pants, looking more like a grandmother than a gangster. Mr. Big was in an armchair half facing her, shined shoes, expensive-looking suit, and a file folder on his lap. Research, he would claim, on James's past.

It was an artful performance. Mr. Big talked about his thirty years at the top, the importance of trust, his unhappiness that his associates had brought James in on the deal without his consent, the need for violence sometimes. “It can get pretty sporty,” he warned. He was looking, he said, for “A to Z” people who could do whatever was needed.

It was an audition and job interview, he said, and he was skeptical she would make the cut.

The encounter, captured by a hidden camera, did at first sound much like a job interview.

James, speaking with a faint British accent, ran through her work experience. She had trained as a nurse in England, she said, but became a flight attendant when her qualifications weren't recognized in Vancouver. She rose through the union ranks to become a national vice-president, but was “knifed in the back” in the rough world of union politics.

Finally, Mr. Big pulled a newspaper clipping about Gladys Wakabayashi's murder from his folder. His people in Vancouver had heard rumours about this, he said. Was she involved?

James hesitated. “This is strictly between you and I, right?”

And then she laid it all out. How she discovered the affair, planned the murder, slashed Wakabayashi's throat, then tormented
her with more cuts, hid the evidence, told no one, and refused to answer police questions.

Mr. Big was impressed, interested. He kept probing for details. Incriminating details.

He asked if there was any evidence that could be used against her, anything she had taken from the home, because his Vancouver connections had heard the rich family was planning a civil suit and pressing the police for action.

“They got this in Vancouver, this cold case squad,” he said. “You ever hear about that?”

And after an hour and forty minutes, James left the hotel room.

Shakespearean tragedies have five acts.

The curtain opened on the final act barely two weeks later, on December 12, when police knocked on the door of James's Richmond house, told her she was charged with first-degree murder, and led her away in handcuffs, leaving behind the Christmas display her neighbours so admired.

James was soon released on bail.

But when her trial began in October 2011, the confession to Mr. Big was a fatal piece of evidence. The defence battled valiantly. James's lawyers suggested other possible killers—the Chinese mafia, Wakabayashi's ex-husband, a plumber who had worked in the home. They questioned the confession to Mr. Big, noting James could have been frightened of the pretend gangster or making up stories to establish her credibility. They pointed to the lack of physical evidence.

None of that persuaded the jury. On November 4, they took only hours to find James guilty. She was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison without parole—effectively a life sentence. An appeal was unsuccessful.

The curtain had fallen. It took nineteen years, but the murder of Gladys Wakabayashi was solved.

L
eo Mantha ate his last meal—a T-bone steak. He wrote a letter to his sister, prayed with the priest, and then shuffled, in chains, to his date with the hangman.

His life ended on April 27, 1959, in a grim concrete shaft at Oakalla Prison. He was the last man hanged in British Columbia.

And he died because he was gay.

Homosexuality was illegal in the 1950s, seen as a sickness and perversion. Gays and lesbians knew to keep their lives and loves hidden.

Mantha was a product of that world. Born on December 22, 1926, he grew up in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic and he was an altar boy. But he knew he was different. When other boys started chasing girls, he went through the motions.

His world was jolted when he was twelve, and learned his family had been living a lie. The woman who he had been told was an older sister was, in fact, his mother. His grandmother had been pretending he was her child. He was never the same, an aunt testified at his trial.

Mantha made it through grade eight, then started work in a munitions plant as the Second World War ended.

He went on to work for the Canadian National Railway, first as an office junior and then in the railway's sprawling brick repair yards in Pointe St. Charles, a tough industrial neighbourhood.

He decided to join the Royal Canadian Navy and get out of Montreal. Mantha's occasional, tentative sexual adventures with men became much more frequent in foreign ports, all with hidden gay bars and clubs.

In San Francisco, during a shore leave that included a lot of drinking, Mantha misjudged his prospective partner. He woke up after a beating, with a raw head wound and lingering headaches, chills, and fevers. He decided to seek medical treatment in the navy hospital when his ship returned to Esquimalt.

That was a mistake. During “neurological tests,” doctors discovered what they called his homosexual depression and feelings of “inferiority and inadequacy.” The military was “the last place in the world for a man with this sort of conflict,” the doctor's report concluded.

Mantha was honourably discharged, and quickly found work as an engineer on tugboats based in Victoria, living close to downtown in James Bay.

He was strong, rough-featured, with a broad, battered nose and a shock of dark hair rising up like a crown. There was a touch of the thug about him, to be sure, but a striking energy.

In the summer of 1958, a gay bartender at the Empress Hotel introduced Mantha to Aaron Jenkins, whom everyone called Bud.

Jenkins was in the navy, but hardly happily. He was seven years younger than Mantha, and enlisted in 1956 mainly because nothing else had worked out back in Coles Valley, Nova Scotia. He couldn't get into teachers' college and didn't like the low pay and long hours as a Royal Bank clerk. The navy was a way out.

But not an entirely successful one. Jenkins was initially unhappy, and surprised he couldn't just quit. An evaluation described him as “immature, highly effeminate and emotionally unstable.” Jenkins was intelligent, but “quite unsuitable for service.”

The two men had an intense affair through the summer, according to Mantha. A photo shows them in bathing suits, Mantha looking away from the camera and Jenkins—square-jawed, tousled hair—looking appraisingly at the photographer.

Then Jenkins tried to call it off and, according to Mantha, said he wasn't gay and was simply hustling Mantha for money. He said he planned to marry a girlfriend.

Mantha confronted Jenkins early on the morning of September 6, 1958, in his sleeping quarters in Nelles Block, a barracks building at
CFB
Esquimalt. Somehow Mantha made his way past sentries at the gate and on each floor of the barracks, and entered the room without waking Jenkins's roommates.

Minutes later, Jenkins lay bleeding, stabbed fatally in the throat. A bloody hunting knife with a five-inch blade was found in the barracks.

Navy officials suggested the death was a suicide. They wanted the case to go away.

But civilian police conducted a proper investigation, and a search of Jenkins's locker, and found love letters signed “All My Love, Leo.”

It did not take long to track down Mantha, who confessed to stabbing Jenkins, but said he didn't intend to kill him.

Mantha's lawyer was George Gregory, an experienced counsel and a serving Liberal
MLA
.

When the trial began, Gregory set out to show this was a crime of passion, and not premeditated murder. The difference for Mantha was enormous—a lengthy prison term, or death by hanging.

When the trial ended, Justice John Ruttan gave the jury three options—not guilty, manslaughter, or murder.

They chose murder.

And in 1958, the automatic sentence was death.

But there was still hope for Mantha. While the law mandated capital punishment, the federal cabinet routinely commuted death sentences to life imprisonment. That was especially true in crimes of passion, where the killing was out of character.

Ruttan immediately wrote to the federal justice minister, Davie Fulton of Kamloops, saying that this was a crime of passion and strongly recommending clemency.

All he got in response was a telegram from Fulton. Mantha would hang.

Partly, Mantha was a victim of politics. The federal government had been routinely commuting death sentences, while continuing to proclaim its support for capital punishment. The issue was politically sensitive. Some executions had to be allowed to go ahead, or its support for the death penalty would look like empty posturing.

John Diefenbaker, the Conservative prime minister elected the year before, opposed the death penalty. He was a former defence lawyer and believed it was too easy for the state to kill an innocent person. His government commuted fifty-five out of sixty-three death sentences over the next six years. But he was not willing to take the risk of abolishing capital punishment. (That did not happen until 1975, in a 130-124 vote in Parliament.)

So someone had to die. Mantha spent 100 days awaiting execution in the same prison with Bob Chapman, a nineteen-year-old farm boy who had killed his older brother. The two were supposed to hang together.

But on April 24, three days before the scheduled hangings, the federal cabinet commuted Chapman's sentence to life imprisonment.

His first words to his mother were about Mantha's fate. “What about Leo. They won't do it to Leo, will they?”

Chapman and his family sent a telegram to Fulton, urging commutation. To no avail.

The other problem—the bigger problem—was that Mantha was gay. That meant inevitable prejudice and scorn at the idea of a crime of passion.

Lloyd McKenzie, who prosecuted Mantha, said twenty years later that Justice John Ruttan believed Mantha's sexual orientation was a strong factor in the government's decision to go ahead with the execution. “He had a very heavy load to carry in defending himself in this case because he was homosexual,” McKenzie said. “There's no doubt about it, that was a very strong factor against him.”

The case was even more sensitive because prejudice and Cold War paranoia had produced a campaign to identify and remove gays and lesbians in the military and intelligence services.

On April 26, Mantha and prison officials began preparing for his death. As the midnight hour of execution neared, a special phone line was kept open, awaiting a last-minute reprieve from Ottawa.

It never came.

Mantha entered the converted elevator shaft used for hangings. He had refused the sedation offered to condemned prisoners. His wrists were bound behind his back and his legs at the knees. His last sight, before the hood was pulled over his head, was hangman Camille Branchaud, the priest, and seven guards standing in a semicircle around him.

Witnesses—including Gregory, his defence lawyer, and two reporters—watched below.

At 12:08 a.m. on April 27, the executioner pulled a long wooden lever, the trap door opened, and Mantha fell. He hung for twelve minutes before being pronounced dead, the forty-fourth person executed in Oakalla. And the last.