Prologue

On the morning of Friday, May 3, 1963, I emerged from my bedroom in my pyjamas to have breakfast with my parents at our home in Calgary, Alberta. At sixteen, I was a typical high school student in perpetual motion. Breakfast and dinner were family times, with my animal-nutritionist father carefully charting my daily intake of protein.

I stopped partway into the kitchen at the sight before me: my parents were both sitting, ashen-faced, staring at each other as the CBC Radio national news reported on happenings in Canada and around the world. The radio sat on the end of the Arborite counter, close by the breakfast nook with a standard Formica-topped table and matching padded chairs in turquoise and chrome. Neither of my parents moved to turn off the radio, as they often did when wanting to encourage conversation with their teenage daughter.

Both continued to sit in silence and glance distractedly at me. “What’s going on?” I asked. Abruptly, my mother got up from her chair and dished out my breakfast, just as she always did. A tall and elegant woman, she was dressed as neatly as ever; her hair had been carefully combed and she was ready as usual to tackle the day before her. Undeterred by their lack of response, I chattered away, finished my breakfast, and headed back to my bedroom to get changed for school.

As I was about to go out the door, my mother stopped me. Composing herself, she delivered a carefully worded speech; it ran something like this: “When you get home from school, neither of us will be here. We are going on a trip, and we don’t know how long we will be away. A woman will arrive in an hour or so to care for your grandmother and prepare your meals. There will be a letter for you from us on the dining-room table. Please read it carefully and do as we ask.” Her formality of speech and rigid stance remain clear in my mind today.

I agreed, albeit a bit perplexed. I bade them goodbye, assured my grandma that I would be home right after school, grabbed my lunch and my homework, and rushed out of the house. As I walked, I reflected about how odd it was that Mom hadn’t told me where they were going on this impromptu trip, and that she didn’t know how long they would be away. My parents were not impulsive people, so I trusted that they would organize everything.

After school, there was indeed a letter waiting for me, and as I read it, I sank onto the sectional couch in disbelief.

Dad and I are flying to Ontario today to be with your cousins, Peggy and Brian. We anticipate being back in about ten days, but we will call you long-distance when we know more. A terrible thing has happened. Your Uncle Bob has murdered his family, Florence, Gladys, Pearl, and little Patsy. I feel very emotional as I write this because we have been in touch recently with Florence and I know she feared for her life. She was pregnant, and the baby was also killed. Pearl was close to delivering her baby, so that makes six people Bob has killed. I know that this will be a shock to you and I am sorry not to be there to cushion this, but we did not want you to hear about this first on tonight’s national news.

We might be returning with Peggy, and if so, I will need a lot of help from you.

Love, Mom

I let the contents of the letter wash over me. My memory went back to the breakfast scene I had unwittingly interrupted. I realized that when I found my parents sitting staring at each other that morning, they had just heard the newscast of a mass murder in Castleton, Ontario. The perpetrator was my father’s older brother, Robert, a former United Church minister.

Fifty-six years later, Margaret — the “Peggy” my mother mentioned — and I embarked on a project to understand what happened that day and what had led up to it in the years before that set the scene for a mass murder. The journey to an understanding of the short- and long-term causes, the events on that horrifying day, and the process by which the survivors moved beyond the trauma of their lives has been intense and, occasionally, very painful. It has also been healing for the two survivors, Margaret and her younger brother, Brian. They have lived almost their whole lives with this tragedy hovering in the background. Over one short Thursday evening in May 1963, a man they had feared for years murdered their pregnant mother, little sister, pregnant older sister, and aunt. At the time of the massacre, the perpetrator was living outside their back door in a shack, charting every move the family made to and from their homes.

The mayhem of that night extended beyond the killings, however. Brian watched as a family friend engaged in hand-to- hand combat with the assailant to try to protect him and his sisters during the murderous frenzy; Brian was blown into a corner by a shotgun with his hair singed from the blast; he watched in shock as his teacher was shot repeatedly by the murderer. Margaret also witnessed the bloody combat and survived by hiding under a bed, finding herself staring directly into the murderer’s eyes as she cowered in the dark against the bedframe that held her captive; both children ran for their lives and survived, but at a huge cost.

Memory, trauma, grief, regret, and healing all figure in the aftermath of this horrific event. The role of the perpetrator, while seemingly straightforward as a malicious madman, was also multi-faceted. One might imagine that he can only be understood as heartless and evil, and yet in addition to being a vicious gunman he was also a brother and a son, and a much-admired brother and son at that. My own father, a kind and intelligent man, was also the perpetrator’s younger sibling. Unable to process what his beloved brother had done, he thought of him only as a “good man” who made one big mistake. Incomprehensibly, he even wrote a long letter to the surviving children years after Robert had wiped out their entire family in which he all but begged them to reconsider Robert in a positive light. Robert had a kind of dark charisma that captured the sympathy and admiration of even the most decent of people: a mixture of coiled fury, a hair-trigger temper that forced everyone into making compromises, and a momentary charm that soon became manipulative. Long before the murders, many people found Robert scary.