A prolific writer and a bank robber, too
VANCOUVER • Stephen Reid, who couldn’t stop robbing banks but also couldn’t stop writing and found love because of it, has died. He was 68.
His publicist confirmed the news on Facebook on Wednesday.
Of Irish and Ojibwa descent, Reid’s notoriety began in the 1970s as part of the Stopwatch Gang, a group of three who executed a series of meticulously planned bank heists, which took just a minute and a half to complete, all while wearing stopwatches around their necks.
The gang’s No. 1 rule was “Nobody gets hurt.”
Their first heist was $750,000 in bullion, taken at the Ottawa airport in 1974. The gang robbed nearly 100 banks and got away with an estimated $15 million before being captured.
He landed a 21-year prison sentence and wrote a novel, Jackrabbit Parole, while behind bars at Kent Institution in Agassiz, B.C. In 1984, the manuscript landed in the hands of Susan Musgrave, a poet and then writer-inresidence at the University of Waterloo.
The novel, a semi-autobiographical account about the Stopwatch Gang, won critical acclaim and also launched a relationship between the two. They would marry in 1986.
He won full parole in 1987 and the family moved to Sidney, B.C., where he became stepfather to Charlotte, and they soon had Sophie, a daughter of their own. He would teach creative writing at Camosun College and also worked as a youth counsellor for a time in the Northwest Territories.
But he struggled with drug addiction and in June 1999 found himself — high on heroin and cocaine — in a botched bank robbery that included an exchange of gunfire with Victoria police and saw him take an elderly couple hostage in a nearby apartment building. He nodded off to sleep and the police arrested him. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Incarcerated at William Head Institution in Victoria, he kept writing and he won the 2013 Butler Book Prize for a collection of essays entitled A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden.
“My life was mostly defined by ex’s these days, exsmoker, ex-con, ex-bank robber, ex-addict. But there was always one shadow I could never seem to turn into an ex — a sense that I am as separate from this world as a switchblade knife,” he wrote.
He was granted parole in February 2014. He would initially live in a halfway house in Victoria and would visit Charlotte’s home.
Eventually, he and Musgrave would move north, to Haida Gwaii, where they ran the Copper Beech Guest House.
Musgrave told CTV News Reid had been in hospital since Friday and was waiting for a medevac to transport him to Vancouver to receive a pacemaker, but the plane couldn’t land in Haida Gwaii.