Honouring the city’s first officer killed in line of duty
As a bagpiper played Amazing Grace, Sheila Thomas retreated from a crowd of police officers, reporters and dignitaries gathered at Edmonton Cemetery Thursday and pulled a package of tissues from her red jacket.
The man buried in the grave around which they had gathered, Frank Beevers, has been dead for almost a century — the first Edmonton police officer killed in the line of duty. But to Thomas, who spent years researching Beevers’ story, he felt more like family than a historical figure.
“It just brought me back to 1918, as if he was just being buried.”
Despite Beevers’ significance to local history, his grave was inexplicably left unmarked for decades — a fact Thomas uncovered through her research. Police dedicated a new headstone to Beevers during a ceremony Thursday afternoon.
“It felt like I got to know him really well through all the research I did,” Thomas said.
“I began to refer to him and think of him as a big brother, and that I had to do this for him.”
Beevers was born in Leeds, England, in 1866. He and wife Maria Farrow immigrated to Canada in 1911, settling on a farm near Lacombe before moving to Edmonton.
Beevers started with Edmonton police in 1915, initially working as a janitor. Three years later, he became a police constable. He was investigating the robbery and murder of a local businessman on Oct. 17, 1918, when he was shot and killed by a suspect in an earlier crime, Joseph Campbell.
Like Beevers, Thomas works as a janitor, usually at worker camps near Fort McMurray. She first learned of Beevers’ case in 2016 while researching her own family history.
“Once I got as far as I could (researching) my own family, I thought, ‘You know, I could probably find out a lot about anybody in the city,’ ” she said.
She started with famous characters from Edmonton’s past. While reading through Emily Murphy’s papers at the city archive, she found a court case in which the historymaking magistrate sentenced someone with a remote connection to a double murder the year before.
“One (victim) was a police officer,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I wonder who that was?’ ”
A short time later, she was walking through Edmonton’s Const. Ezio Faraone Park and saw Beevers’ name on a plaque alongside the names of other slain police officers.
She was curious about Beevers’ case, and knew she could get records about where people are buried if they were interred 25 years ago or longer.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to go pay my respects,’” she said. But when she got to the cemetery, she couldn’t find the grave.
“I took the names of the surrounding stones, and went back to the archives several times. And I’m like, ‘He’s supposed to be right here, where is his marker?’ ”
Police said Beevers was buried with full police honours three days after his death. As best anyone can tell, a wooden cross was erected to mark the grave, but it decayed and wasn’t replaced. Police believe Farrow eventually moved back to England after the loss of her husband.
Thomas thought police would like to know that Beevers’ grave was unmarked. In February 2017, she appeared on then Edmonton historian laureate Chris Chang-Yen Phillips’ podcast and interviewed police about the story.
“I said, ‘It’s in your hands now, I’m going to leave it to you and I want it all to be about Frank now,’” she said.
About two months ago, Graham Beevers, who is Frank Beevers’ great-great nephew, received an email from Edmonton police that filled in a blank spot in their family history.
His daughter, Candy Johnson, is interested in genealogy and traced much of their lineage back to the 1700s, he said. She found that nearly everybody in the family had been “born and raised and lived and died in the Wharfe Valley of Yorkshire” — except for Frank Beevers.
“She’d lost track of Frank when he had emigrated, so we knew nothing,” he said.
Thomas said her friend Lyn Mehann, a professional genealogist, spent months helping police locate Beevers’ distant family members.
When Graham Beevers and Johnson heard of Frank’s significance to Edmonton history, and that police wanted to dedicate a new monument to him, they decided to come to Canada from London, England, where they live.
“The realization that one of our ancestors has ... fame that we didn’t know about, (we thought) we ought to come,” he said.
Thomas met with Beevers and Johnson for dinner the night before the ceremony. She handed over a binder of documents she had complied on their ancestor — news clippings, birth and death certificates, and other archival material.
Thomas said she felt a connection to the old police officer that was hard to shake.
“Like Const. Beevers, I’m a janitor,” she said. “So I felt really affiliated with him. We were the same age at the time. I said, ‘OK, he’s telling me something, I’ve got to find out what’s going on.’”