TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
The intriguing stories behind some of the artifacts at the Vancouver Police Museum
Lethal weapons from the streets
About 15,000 people a year visit the Police Museum, a non-profit that operates on an annual budget of less than $200,000.
For many visitors the big attraction is Arsenault's Arsenal, a collection of weapons the police confiscated off the streets over several decades.
Some of them are mind-boggling, like a wooden baseball bat that has nails sticking out of it and a scary-looking weapon with a pair of heavy spiked balls that are attached to a wooden handle with a metal chain.
“They're called morning stars, morgenstern in German,” said retired policeman Al Arsenault, 64, who was on the force for 27 years before retiring in 2006. “It's actually a medieval weapon, knights used to smash each other with them."
The display includes all sorts of brass knuckles, a time-honoured favourite in the underworld.
Arnsenault chuckles as he relates the story of the museum's most ornate “brass” knuckles, which are actually made of gold.
“Eleven-and-a-quarter ounces of gold,” he says, “along with some diamonds, rubies and emeralds. It's $30,000 in raw material.”
The gold knuckles came off a Hell's Angel.
“A motorcycle traffic (cop), Rob Deighton, caught him with them on Robson, sipping a latte, sitting on his bike,” Arsenault relates.
“Deighton said, ‘Those are prohibited. Get rid of them.' The Angel took them off.
"Deighton told me about them and I said, ‘Oh! Seize those suckers!' So he sees the guy wearing them again, and seizes them.”
Arsenault recalls that the Angel's lawyer asked if his client could have the knuckles back, offering to shave the dove tails off so they wouldn't interlock together.
“‘I said, 'No. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll get the Crown to think about a stay of proceedings if he donates them to the Police Museum.'
"So I had him sign them over. They were up on the wall and somebody came in with one of those butane lighters and tried to cut a hole through the plastic (tie). They almost got through. That's why they ended up in the (museum's) safe. It's too much of a target.”
Arsenault was often challenged in court over weapons he confiscated.
“I used to give testimony and they'd argue, ‘It's not a prohibited weapon,'” he recounts.
“My acid test was, ‘I'll hit you (the defence counsel) or your client with this thing, and if you laugh at me it's not a prohibited weapon. If your head caves in, it's a prohibited weapon.' Nobody took me up on it.”
Stanley Park’s notorious unsolved murder
One of the most notorious murders in Vancouver history is the Babes in the Woods case.
“A worker in Stanley Park doing landscaping came across the bodies,” explains Roslynn Shipp, director of the Police Museum.
“He found what looked like two skeletons, a woman's shoe and some other artifacts, which we have here. A lunch box, a shoe, flaps from the children's caps, and a woman's shoe.”
The skeletons were discovered on Jan. 14, 1953, but the two children whose remains were discovered had probably died years earlier, between 1944 and 1947. The theory is they were bludgeoned to death with a hatchet that was found nearby.
Police forensic science was relatively primitive in 1953. The police believed that the babes were a boy and a girl, and that they had been between six and 10 years old.
Tips flooded in about possible victims, and anthropologist Erna Van Baiersdorf made busts of the victims to try to crack the case. But nothing panned out and the case stayed unsolved.
The remains went into the Police Museum after it opened in 1986. The skulls of the two murdered children were on display, along with their bones and the hatchet that killed them.
In 1998, Vancouver police sergeant Brian Honeybourn thought the children should finally be laid to rest. Casts were made of the skulls and bones, and the remains were buried at sea.
Honeybourn also took bone samples from the remains to UBC DNA expert Dr. David Sweet, who made a startling discovery. Both the kids were boys.
The police started looking again through three boxes of old clues in their files. One was a statement from a teacher named Smith, who told police that he had seen a hysterical woman with blood on her shoe together with a nervous man in Stanley Park in 1947.
Unfortunately, the case remains unsolved. And casts of the poor kids who were discovered 64 years ago in Stanley Park are on display in the museum, alongside the weapon that did them in.
“A worker in Stanley Park doing landscaping came across the bodies” ROSLYNN SHIPP DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE MUSEUM
Hollywood swashbuckler meets the Grim Reaper
Errol Flynn wasn’t murdered. But when the Hollywood legend died in Vancouver on Oct. 14, 1959, it was international news.
Flynn shot to fame in the late 1930s in adventure movies like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. But he was 50 when he came to Vancouver, and on the downside of his career.
He came to town to sell his yacht to a local stockbroker. He brought along a 17-year-old girlfriend, which led to a local legend he’d suffered a heart attack in the midst of “aggressive cuddling” at the Sylvia Hotel.
In fact, he died in a penthouse at 1310 Burnaby in the West End. The apartment belonged to Dr. Grant Gould, the uncle of musician Glenn Gould.
Flynn was taken there after he fell ill en route to the airport. Gould gave him some Demerol and Flynn went to a bedroom to rest. After a few minutes, his girlfriend went in and found Flynn dead.
His body was taken to St. Paul’s Hospital, then to the morgue.
Flynn’s autopsy was conducted on one of two stainless steel beds that are now on display in the autopsy room in the museum.
The beds are tilted, so that fluids can drain during a procedure. There is a scale for weighing organs, and a blackboard where the pathologist would write down the results before putting the organs into mason jars for safekeeping.
The blackboard has categories for the brain, left lung, right lung, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys and thymus. But the pathologist in Flynn’s case was most interested in some large warts on the film legend’s nether regions. He lopped them off.
There was a problem, however.
“When (coroner) Glen McDonald came in, he was like, ‘What? The body was supposed to go for a second autopsy in L.A.!’” said museum director Shipp.
“‘You can’t do that, you have to put the warts back on.’ And the story follows that they taped the warts back on.”
Cops, thugs and guns, guns, guns
The museum has eight Tommy guns in its collection, which is the nickname for the Thompson sub-machine gun that was popular with both the police and gangsters in the 1920s and ’30s.
“They were used up into the mid’30s by the police,” said Shipp.
“We have three different models on display, the rarest being the 1927 model. I believe only 42 of them were produced.”
Tommy guns came with two types of magazines: regular box magazines that held 20 or 30 rounds, or circular, so-called drum magazines that held 50 rounds. “It fires about 600 rounds per minute,” said Shipp.
One of the quirks of the early police force is that there was no standard police gun.
“All the officers now have the same firearm, a Sig Sauer,” said Shipp. “But back in the day they could choose their own firearm.”
The museum’s gun room includes samples of some weapons police used before standard sidearms were introduced. Among them is a Wild West-era Smith and Wesson revolver and a Colt New Police “Cop and Thug” model revolver.
The Cop and Thug model was produced between 1882 and 1886. It’s easily identifiable as a Cop and Thug because the handle features an engraving of a policeman grappling with a knife-wielding bad guy.
One of the most treasured guns in the collection is more modest, a Belgian version of an English Webley from the late 1800s. It belonged to Const. Lewis Byers, who was the first Vancouver police officer killed in the line of duty. Byers had it in his hand when he was shot and killed by Oscar Larson on March 25, 1912, outside Larson’s waterfront shack near today’s Ballantyne Pier.
The police had received word that a belligerent drunk was shooting off a gun on the waterfront, and Byers was sent to the scene.
An eyewitness said Byers told Larson “to throw up your hands or I’ll shoot.” After firing a warning shot, Byers ran toward Larson’s shack, and Larson gunned him down. Byers was only 21 years old. Several years ago, now-retired VPD Sgt. Steve Gibson and Const. Tod Catchpole created a website honouring the 16 VPD officers who have died on duty.
Gibson located some of Byers’ relatives in Alberta, and discovered they still had his revolver, which had been given to the family by his former partner. In 2014, the family donated it to the museum.