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Photo: [Wong Foon Sing]'s murder charge was front-page news in the Vancouver Sun. ; Photo: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun / 3851 Osler, in Vancouver, as it was in August 1993. The house was the scene of the still-unsolved 1924 murder of nanny [Janet Smith]. ; Photo: Janet Smith's elaborate memorial in Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery was paid for by the city's Scottish societies, which represented about a third of Vancouver's population in the mid-1920s. ; Photo: Malcolm B. Jackson, a special investigator appointed by the provincial attorney-general ; Photo: Constable [James Green] of the Point Grey police, the first officer on the scene at Osler Street house ; Photo: H.J. Simpson, chief of the Point Grey police at the time of the bungled murder investigation. ; Photo: John Murdoch, who succeeded Simpson as police chief and was tried in Wong's kidnapping. ; Photo: Dr. Bertie Blackwood, the medical examiner, who believed Smith's death was an accident. ;
The men in the white hoods held up a picture of Wong Foon Sing's wife and told him he would never see her again.
They closed in on Wong and dropped a noose around his neck. They tugged on the rope and kicked at the stool under Wong's feet.
Things went black.
This was justice in Vancouver in the 1920s.
Wong Foon Sing's problems began on a hot July day in 1924, when Constable James Green was called to investigate a shooting among the winding boulevards and manicured estates of Shaughnessy Heights.
On the basement floor of an Osler Street home, Green found the body of a 22-year old woman with a massive wound on the right side of her head.
A .45-calibre automatic pistol lay by her right hand.
Green saw no bullet, no blood or brain tissue on the walls. There were no powder burns on the young woman's face, suggesting that the gun had been fired from some distance away. The back of her head was smashed in, as if by a heavy object.
Constable Green, an experienced officer, weighed the evidence and decided there was only one answer -- Janet Smith had killed herself. It was, he would tell his superiors, the clearest case of suicide he had ever seen.
Janet Smith's body was rushed to a mortuary and embalmed before an autopsy could be performed. A month later, when the authorities dug up the body and belatedly tried to find out what had happened, they found the mortician's work had made their job nearly impossible.
Rumours took the place of forensic evidence. Soon, it seemed, everyone in town had heard stories about who had killed Janet Smith.
People whispered of a cover up, of an orgy involving socially prominent men and women that ended in the Scottish-born nursemaid's death. Wong Foon Sing, the 27-year old houseboy who found Smith's body, was believed to hold the key to the mystery.
The police may have botched the investigation, but they thought they knew how to beat the truth out of a Chinese immigrant. Police agents dressed in white Ku Klux Klan hoods kidnapped Wong and confined him to a west-side home for six weeks, where they beat and threatened to lynch him.
Over and over again, Wong told them the same story.
Then, because they had no evidence, the police charged Wong with murder.
UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
The papers called Janet Smith the Scottish Nightingale, and speculated that she had met death with "a song on her lips." It was one of the less inventive things the English-language press would write about the killing.
By all accounts, Janet Smith was an intelligent, lively, and cheerful young woman. She had a string of boyfriends and seems to have been a bit of a flirt.
Born in Perth, Scotland, Janet grew up in a working-class district of London. In January 1923, she went to work for Frederick Baker and his wife Doreen, caring for their daughter, Rosemary.
Though originally from Vancouver, Baker had spent most of the past few years in London, running an import-export business. In April of 1923 he moved the family to Paris on business. Janet Smith went along. Six months after that, they all sailed to Vancouver.
Vancouver at the time was going through one of its recurrent booms. Forty years before, this West Coast city might have been little more than a collection of shacks and native settlements surrounded by bush, but by the 1920s it had built itself into a class and race-conscious little society modelled on English customs and ideals.
The Bakers held a comfortable place in the aristocracy of that society. A descendant of two prominent West Coast families, Frederick Baker played tennis and drank with some of the wealthiest people in town.
In July of 1924, the Bakers were staying at the Shaughnessy home of Frederick's brother. The home, at 3851 Osler, near 22nd and Oak, was modest by Shaughnessy standards, but was still spacious enough to accommodate a nursemaid's room on the top floor and a room for the Chinese houseboy in the basement -- in the racial climate of the 1920s, white servants lived upstairs, Asians downstairs.
B.C.'s Chinese had long been viewed with hostility by the province's white majority. In 1887, a mob attacked a camp of Chinese men who were clearing land at Coal Harbour and drove them from the city. In 1907, a mob operating under the name of the Asiatic Exclusion League destroyed much of Chinatown.
In the 1920s, persons of Chinese descent could not become Canadian citizens, which meant they could not join professions such as medicine, architecture or law. They were barred from public swimming pools and restricted to the balconies of movie theatres.
In 1923, the federal government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which ended almost all Chinese immigration. Before that, a "head tax" charged on all Chinese immigrants had forced most Chinese men who came to this country to leave their families behind.
The Baker's houseboy was among the immigrants who came to B.C. seeking work, leaving his wife behind in China. Wong Foon Sing was a tall, dapper and handsome young man, whose job was to cook and clean for the Bakers.
As Wong would tell the authorities again and again, on July 26 he was alone in the Osler Street house with Janet, who was ironing in the basement, and baby Rosemary, who was napping upstairs. Wong said he was peeling potatoes for lunch when he heard what he thought at first was a car's backfire.
He looked out the window and saw nothing. Venturing into the basement, he saw Janet lying on her back. Blood was pouring from her head.
DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE
Wong telephoned Baker at his downtown office and told him something was wrong with "Nursie."
Baker rushed home and called police.
Constable Green, the only man in the station when the call came in, attended. A former chief detective with the B.C. Provincial Police, Green had lost that job in a wave of layoffs that made room for a slate of patronage appointments. After bouncing around for a while, he found work with the police force of Point Grey -- at the time a separate municipality that included Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy. It was a force that was notorious for protecting the interests of the rich property owners who made up much of the municipality.
Editorial writers of the day were demanding the Point Grey force be amalgamated with the downtown force and Constable Green's investigation would give them plenty of ammunition.
Green inspected the body. Smith, dressed in a blue denim nursemaid's uniform, was lying on her back, her head under a laundry tub, her arms by her sides as if she were asleep.
By her right side was an iron, still warm.
Green picked up the pistol lying beside Janet Smith's right hand, looked it over and obliterated whatever fingerprints might have been on the weapon. While the Point Grey medical examiner looked over the body, Green interviewed Wong, then went upstairs alone with Baker.
The undertakers quickly arrived and took Janet Smith away. Coroner W.D. Brydone-Jack and the Point Grey police both told the undertaker to embalm the body immediately. It was the first time he had embalmed a victim of violent death without a post-mortem, but the mortician followed orders.
If there were clues to be found on her body, they may have been lost in the embalming. The mortician's art would later make it impossible, for example, to say for certain if Janet had been sexually assaulted.
The mortuary men undressed Janet's body and dumped her bloodstained clothes in a pile. Blood seeped through the garments, turning them into less-than-reliable evidence. Some would later argue that Janet had been dressed after she was killed, but there would be no way to say for sure.
The embalmer did discover something that would never be properly explained -- strange burns on Janet's right side.
It didn't take long for the newspapers to begin questioning the suicide verdict. The Vancouver Star, a scandal sheet published by General Victor Odlum, led the way two days after the death with the bold red headline: Nurse's Death Puzzles -- Suicide Theory Is Not Satisfactory to Officials.
Odlum was an enemy of General A.D. McRae, the millionaire father of Frederick Baker's sister-in-law. The death of Janet Smith gave Odlum a perfect opportunity to stir up trouble for the rival general.
The newspaper stories roused the city's Scottish societies. Scots made up one-third of Vancouver's population, and they had organized themselves into a score of groups dedicated to preserving Scottish culture and protecting the welfare of fellow countrymen.
The umbrella society that comprised these groups began to demand answers.
Reverend Duncan McDougall in particular took up Janet's case with a gusto that was matched only by his hatred for Vancouver's Chinese. McDougall was wildly opposed to Chinese workers, whom he denounced - - like many on the West Coast -- for taking away jobs from whites.
McDougall was also a fan of the Ku Klux Klan, which was beginning to organize in Vancouver at the time. The Kanadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would even set up a headquarters in Shaughnessy the year after Janet's death, in a house now known as Canuck Place, the children's hospice.
Shortly after the shooting, a remarkably incurious inquest jury agreed with the police that Janet Smith's death was suicide or, at least, an accident.
The jury bought a scenario that had Janet interrupting her ironing in the basement to walk upstairs to the attic where the gun was kept, carrying it back down to the basement and, holding the pistol at arm's length, somehow shooting herself in the head.
The Star continued to run stories hinting that Janet had been murdered. The more respectable Sun, which was campaigning to amalgamate the police forces of the Vancouver area, used the bungled investigation to buttress its arguments.
After a call from an unnamed newspaperman, possibly General Odlum, Attorney-General Alex Manson took an interest in the case. After reading a transcript of the inquest, he assigned a special investigator.
Eventually, the Scots' pressure produced a second inquest. This time, the verdict was murder.
WHITE HOODS AND A NOOSE
But who was the murderer? There were plenty of rumours that Janet was killed by someone rich enough to pay off the police. Fantasies about the depraved jazz-age lifestyles of Vancouver's rich were almost as compelling in 1924 as images of the so-called yellow peril. People whispered about a drunken -- or drug-fuelled -- party where Janet was ravished, then killed with a blow to the head.
Frederick Baker was the culprit, some said. Others pointed their fingers at Jack Nichol, the playboy son of the lieutenant-governor.
Some even claimed the killer was the Prince of Wales, who had recently popped into Victoria incognito, using the title Earl of Renfrew.
Everybody was sure of one thing: Wong Foon Sing knew more than he was telling. Many believed he was the murderer on the strength of melodramatic stories of the day that painted Oriental men as sinister desperadoes bent on molesting white women.
The police hired a private detective to kidnap Wong. The houseboy was held for a few hours at the detective's downtown offices, slapped around a bit, then released when he could tell his captors nothing new.
Convinced that more extreme measures were needed, the private detective -- funded by the municipality of Point Grey and the Scottish societies and apparently believing he was operating under legal immunity granted by Attorney-General Manson himself -- scooped up the houseboy again.
After blindfolding Wong and threatening to kill him, the detective's men drove him around long enough to make him believe he had been taken to the U.S. But instead of the States, Wong was in a rented house on the west side of Vancouver, where he was shackled to the floor.
Repeated beatings brought forth no new information from the terrified houseboy. The kidnappers, dressed in Klan robes and pointed hoods, stood him on a stool, put a noose around his neck and told Wong he would never see his family again.
They pulled at the rope around his neck and threatened to kick the stool out from under him. Wong passed out. When he awoke he was on his cot with his legs shackled again. He began spitting up blood.
Finally, the captors told Wong he was about to be executed. They blindfolded and handcuffed him and put him in a car. After driving around for a couple of hours, the kidnappers dumped Wong at the side of a Point Grey road, where he was picked up by a waiting policeman.
A DRUNKEN QUARREL?
If Wong thought his ordeal had ended, he was wrong.
The Crown charged him with the murder of Janet Smith and threw him into Oakalla prison. When a lawyer tried to see him he was told Wong was being held in a storage shed outside the main prison building under a "secrecy ban" that prohibited any visitors -- including legal counsel.
When the lawyer did get in to see Wong, he found him delirious, his face covered with scratches and bruises.
Chinese community groups and the Chinese consulate protested loudly, but few whites listened.
A few editorial voices did complain, however. The Sun called the affair "the most ghastly injustice that has ever been perpetrated in Canada" and wrote that if a Canadian were abused in a similar fashion by the Chinese government, "a British gunboat would have been on the job in 24 hours."
Reverend McDougall, who had done so much to inflame Scottish hatred against the houseboy, declared the editorial's author should be tried for contempt of court.
Rumours continued to fill the vacuum left by the absence of evidence. A self-proclaimed clairvoyant told the papers she had seen the solution in a dream. In her dream the clairvoyant saw a wild party at the Baker house, with many prominent men. Some of the drunken guests quarrelled, then fought. Someone hit Janet over the head with something, maybe a heater used to warm the baby's bottles.
When this sensation petered out, the clairvoyant changed her story. Now she claimed she had attended the party and had witnessed the wild scene. The fact that she provided totally inaccurate descriptions of the prominent men she claimed to have seen was not enough to destroy the faith of some of her believers.
HEROES IN HOODS
Wong eventually stood trial for murder, although even the attorney-general admitted he didn't think the houseboy was guilty. Instead, the authorities said, putting Wong on the stand might smoke out the real killer.
This strategy met with approval from the English-language press. The general line in the papers was that Wong had nothing to fear if he was innocent. The possibility of a wrongful conviction for murder -- punished by hanging in those days -- did not seem to trouble the editorialists.
A jury eventually found what the police and Crown had known all along, that there was no real evidence against Wong. His trial failed to smoke out any other likely suspects.
Wong went back to work for the Bakers and stayed in Vancouver despite rumours he would be charged again, perhaps as an accessory to murder.
Finally, in 1926, he said goodbye to the country that had treated him so brutally and caught a ship back to Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, a dispute over pay had brought the kidnapping plot to light. Charges were laid against the private detective, his son and an employee. But it was the identities of the other accused that caused a sensation -- among the alleged kidnappers were two Point Grey police commissioners, the chief of police, a detective sergeant and three prominent officials of the city's Scottish societies.
The kidnappers were seen as heroes by white Vancouver. One of the detective's agents, the man who had blown the whistle because he was unhappy with his share of the pay, pleaded guilty to kidnapping. The detective and his son were convicted, but the jury added a "strong recommendation for mercy."
The Point Grey police were acquitted and, in a decision that prompted a loud and long debate in the legislature, the attorney- general's department ordered the Crown not to proceed against the remaining defendants, including the reeve of Point Grey and the government's own special prosecutor.
LEGACIES
Whoever killed Janet Smith got away with it.
There is a handsome memorial to her in Mountain View cemetery, paid for by the city's Scottish societies. B.C. Liberal MLA Mary Ellen Smith, no relation to Janet, was less successful in creating another memorial to the Scottish nursemaid. The "Janet Smith bill" would have prohibited British Columbians from employing Chinese servants and white women in the same house.
The bill did not make it through the B.C. legislature. For one thing, it was clearly unconstitutional, even in the mid-1920s. Perhaps just as importantly, the proposed law upset white employers, who said it would force them to fire their white servants. After all, the Chinese worked so much harder and were cheaper to keep.
Janet Smith has left another legacy, however. Her story remains the most intriguing unsolved murder in B.C. history. Two histories have been written about the case. A play, Disposing of the Dead by Katherine Schlemmer, and a novel, Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, deal with the events.
And still people speculate about what happened.
A few years ago, a history student going through former attorney- general Manson's private papers found a copy of a letter that was sent to Janet Smith's parents in London.
It said their daughter's killer had committed suicide in 1925 in a private New Westminster sanatorium known as Hollywood Hospital. Police had not arrested the killer, Manson wrote, because the publicity would have shamed the family of the lieutenant-governor.
That points to Jack Nichol, the playboy son of Lieutenant- Governor Walter Nichol, who was also the publisher of The Province. The only problem is that Jack Nichol did not die in Hollywood Hospital. He died instead in Victoria in 1941, more than 15 years after Manson wrote to Janet's parents.
Nor is there any record of any other member of the Nichol family dying in 1925, in or out of an exclusive sanatorium.
Constable Green left the Point Grey police force in 1926 and bought a half interest in a downtown hotel. The gossips always claimed, with no proof, that the money he used to buy his share was hush money from Frederick Baker, Janet Smith's employer.
And what about Baker? Many of the rumours were built on a belief that Janet died because she had stumbled upon the secret of his drug smuggling.
There was never any evidence offered to support this, however.
By April, 1956, Baker had moved to Qualicum, on Vancouver Island. On a visit to Vancouver to see his doctor, Baker checked into the St. Regis Hotel. He was in the room with a Doris MacAuly when, as MacAuly would tell police, he suddenly said, "I'm suffocating," opened the window and climbed out on the fire escape.
Despite MacAuly's attempts to hold him back, the 65-year old Baker then tumbled 15 metres to the sidewalk.
Baker had checked into the hotel under the name L.L. Smith.
The Sun marked Baker's death with a four-paragraph story on page 9 that made no mention of the Janet Smith case. The next day, columnist Jack Wasserman noted that Baker had been "a key witness" in the affair.
"The fantastic case was never solved although it was [a] page one story for nearly two years," Wasserman wrote.
MONEY AND INFLUENCE
Lincoln Chew, a psychology professor at the University of Lethbridge, remembers his mother and grandmother talking about the case when he was growing up. Vancouver's Chinatown was very much a small society in the 1920s, and Chew's grandmother, as the wife and daughter of prominent members of the community, heard the following story:
Although Wong Foon Sing never changed his account of Janet Smith's death during all his dealings with the justice system, it seems he told Chinese community elders a different tale.
Wong said the "master of the house," Baker, had a roving eye and could not keep his hands to himself. Wong apparently had the impression that something was going on between Baker and Janet.
Wong heard the two argue a number of times before he found Janet dead.
Chew says his mother believed Janet Smith had an affair with Baker and threatened to go public with the story.
There are problems with this scenario. If Wong knew more than he let on, why didn't he tell his kidnappers during the six weeks they beat him and threatened him with death? And wouldn't the Chinatown elders have made sure this story was used at Wong's trial?
Chew says the Janet Smith killing had a profound effect on the Chinese community. And that, more than any speculation about the killer's identity, might be the most significant legacy of the whole sorry affair.
For many of Chinatown's older residents, the tensions of the case brought back memories of the 1907 race riots, Chew said.
Chew said his mother used the murder as an example of Vancouver's anti-Chinese sentiment.
"I remember my mom making the observation that, `They know who did it, but they aren't saying anything. That's what money and influence can buy you, I guess. In the meantime, that poor girl is dead and all she tried to do was make a life in a new country.'
"That kind of stuck with me over the years."
Sources for this story include newspaper files, interviews, and the books Who Killed Janet Smith?, by Edward Starkins; Canadian Holy War: A Story of Clans, Tongs, Murder and Bigotry, by Ian Macdonald and Betty O'Keefe; The Saga of Red Ryan and Other Tales of Violence from Canada's Past, by Martin Robin; Vancouver, by Eric Nicol; Vancouver, Milltown to Metropolis, by Alan Morley; and The Encyclopedia of B.C.
Photo: Wong Foon Sing's murder charge was front-page news in the Vancouver Sun. ; Photo: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun / 3851 Osler, in Vancouver, as it was in August 1993. The house was the scene of the still-unsolved 1924 murder of nanny Janet Smith. ; Photo: Janet Smith's elaborate memorial in Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery was paid for by the city's Scottish societies, which represented about a third of Vancouver's population in the mid-1920s. ; Photo: Malcolm B. Jackson, a special investigator appointed by the provincial attorney-general ; Photo: Constable James Green of the Point Grey police, the first officer on the scene at Osler Street house ; Photo: H.J. Simpson, chief of the Point Grey police at the time of the bungled murder investigation. ; Photo: John Murdoch, who succeeded Simpson as police chief and was tried in Wong's kidnapping. ; Photo: Dr. Bertie Blackwood, the medical examiner, who believed Smith's death was an accident. ;
(Copyright Vancouver Sun 2001)