The gift of Glen Davis
His murder on the orders of his own godson continues to overshadow his legacy as one of the most committed conservationists Canada has ever known. Ten years later, his widow, his friends and the many wilderness groups he supported say it is time for that
Those closest to Glen Davis wanted to mark the 10th anniversary of his death by remembering his enormous generosity and contribution to conservation, not for the shocking and violent way he died. They hoped to transform the dark event into a celebration of his life and legacy with the creation of a new $10,000 award named in his honour, given last week to B.C. conservationist Anne Sherrod.
But a decade after his execution in the basement parking lot of a midtown Toronto office building on May 18, 2007, some, including members of Davis’s inner circle, feel he has not received the recognition he deserves.
“Absolutely, he’s been overlooked,” said lawyer Peter Quinn, a longtime friend of Davis and a trustee of the late philanthropist’s estate.
“He’s contributed more to the environmental well-being of this country than almost anyone else that I can think of.”
Quinn would like the federal government to do something in Davis’s memory, perhaps naming a wilderness area after him. But so far, he says, there’s been “no response.”
Davis’s death at age 66 left a huge gap in fundraising that’s never been replaced, said Éric Hébert-Daly, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS).
“It’s a constant struggle for a lot of us to have the kind of support Glen provided,” he said. “I don’t think the world knows enough about him.”
Davis remains the biggest individual donor to conservation groups in Canada, said Monte Hummel, president emeritus of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada. Hummel was head of environmental advocacy group Pollution Probe when he met Davis in the 1970s.
Davis’s financial support led to the establishment of 1,000 new parks and added millions of hectares of protected land in Canada.
He also contributed money to women’s rowing and golf, an acknowledgment that female athletes did not get the same level of support as their male counterparts. On Wednesday, Rowing Canada will host a tree-planting ceremony in London, Ont., in his honour.
“There was a really touching thing about Glen: when he funded environmental groups and activists, he wanted to take care of them personally.” ANNE SHERROD FIRST WINNER OF GLEN DAVIS CONSERVATION LEADERSHIP PRIZE
Like her late husband, Mary Alice Davis has an aversion to publicity. But she made arare exception last week to talk about the man she wedded 53 years ago.
“It was interesting. It was fun. There wasn’t a dull moment,” she said of their marriage.
Originally from Leamington, Mary Alice Setterington met Glen Davis when she worked for the dean of women at the University of Western Ontario in London. He was studying political science and was a standout member of the swim team.
She was the first woman Davis ever invited home — to his parents’ 29room Toronto mansion, complete with servants and Rolls-Royces. After their wedding in 1965, in a small civil ceremony, the pair headed to Winnipeg, where Glen Davis taught political science at the University of Manitoba.
A few years later, they returned to Toronto, where Davis went to work for his father, Nelson Morgan Davis, a business tycoon who owned a conglomerate of more than 50 transportation and manufacturing companies. Mary Alice ran the household, travelled with Davis on business trips and for many years volunteered at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
Davis eventually inherited an estate worth tens of millions of dollars.
Mary Alice cheerfully supported his many endeavours, even if it took him away for weeks at a time. “He was never happier than when he was out camping,” she said.
Besides, when he was away, “I didn’t have to cook,” she said with a hearty laugh.
In the early years, Mary Alice joined her husband on some of his wilderness adventures and they shared a love of animals. But she preferred a mattress to terra firma. “I liked hiking, but I wanted to go to the motel.”
She admired and shared his guiding philosophy: “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Glen Davis didn’t wear his wealth on his sleeve and neither does Mary Alice. Davis preferred outdoor clothing and Tilley hats to Harry Rosen suits. Mary Alice shops at Chicos, a U.S.-based womenswear retailer found in Canadian suburban shopping malls since 2014.
Warm and friendly, her flaxen hair is short and neatly styled. She is casually dressed in a simple black top and pants, a turquoise shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and black flats. She wears gold hoop earrings, a bead bracelet and a department store-brand watch.
With no children of their own, the couple had dinners and spent time during the holidays with Davis’s extended family, including first cousin Marsha. Her father was Nelson Morgan Davis’s brother, Marsh, whom the mogul put in charge of one of his trucking companies.
Marsha and her husband, Murray Ross, had two children, including a son, Marshall. Davis and Mary Alice were the boy’s godparents and doted on him as he grew up in Lawrence Park. He called them uncle and aunt.
Davis invited Marshall Ross on his wilderness trips and, in 2004, gave him a $2.5-million loan to start a home renovation business. A year earlier, Ross had married Eva Wower beneath a tent behind Penryn House, a Tudor mansion and then headquarters of Davis’s investment and holding company, N.M. Davis Corp. at Bayview Ave. and York Mills Rd.
Resentments existed on the Ross side, particularly after Davis replaced Marsh Davis as head of a trucking company, but they were largely hidden.
In December 2005, Davis was badly beaten by a man wielding a baseball bat. No arrests were ever made.
Seventeen months later, he was fatally shot walking to his truck after lunching with a WWF official.
At a private family funeral at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Marshall Ross placed Davis’s ashes in the grave.
And while homicide detectives worked to crack the case, Ross and Wower, now parents of a boy and girl, stayed close to Mary Alice, the grieving widow. On one occasion, Wower joined her on a trip to New York City.
During that period, Mary Alice remembers asking Ross how he could afford to take his family to Tuscany, where he rented a villa.
In March 2009, after a 21-month investigation, police arrested Ross and three other men and charged them with first-degree murder.
Police alleged Ross hired Dmitri Kossyrine and Jesse Smith whom he knew through his home renovation business and they turned to Ivgeny Vorobiov as their gun for hire. (Smith would plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact.)
Told of her godson’s arrest, Mary Alice said “those poor children.” She was referring to Ross’s kids.
In October 2011, a week before his trial was to begin, Marshall Ross pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
Mary Alice was in court to hear the surprise plea.
“I cannot do anything to change the terrible thing that I have done,” he said in a statement read out in court by his lawyer.
Ross was having financial difficul- ties and wrongly thought he might be in Davis’s will. He also admitted resenting that Davis, who was adopted, was giving away the family fortune. (Davis left a spousal trust for Mary Alice that will pass to a list of his hand-picked charities after her death.)
Prosecutor Hank Goody read Mary Alice’s victim impact statement in which she described the “anguish and desolation” she had felt since her husband’s murder. What Ross had done was a “disgusting betrayal.”
When asked how she is doing today, she responds politely and firmly. “I’m fine.”
Thinking back to that time, she’s at a loss for words.
“So horrific,” she said, shaking her head and closing her eyes.
At 79, she lives in the leafy Mt. Pleasant-Lawrence neighbourhood in the same house she shared with her husband. She plays bridge with close friends, travels, plays golf and gardens, which is what she was doing at the time her husband was murdered.
In her victim impact statement, Mary Alice wrote that the judicial process had divided the family. Mutual friends were forced to take sides. The same holds true today.
“I felt some people moving away from me. Amazing are the ones that stuck by and the ones who came for- ward,” she said.
She has never heard from Ross’s mother, who remarried and is now Marsha Brooks. Police say she refuses to accept that her son engineered the killing.
“There’s always another side, but I’m not going to comment,” Brooks told the Star last week before hanging up the phone. She was not in court when Ross pleaded guilty.
Nor has Mary Alice heard from Wower. “If they’re like that, why would I or want to go backwards,” she said gently. “Their true colours came out.” Toronto police Insp. Mike Barsky, one of the lead homicide investigators on the Davis case, says anyone who believes Ross is innocent is delusional.
“Unfortunately, the evidence and his plea would not support that,” Barsky said. “He was not coerced to plea.”
Barsky is among those working quietly behind the scenes to help bring wider attention to Davis, and was disappointed to learn the Order of Canada cannot be posthumously conferred.
Still grinding through the justice system are the appeals by two of the men convicted in the first-degree murder of Davis: Kossyrine and Vo- robiov. Just last week, the province’s highest court dismissed Kossyrine’s appeal.
Because of his guilty plea, Marshall Ross, now 46, can’t appeal and is in a federal penitentiary serving a life sentence.
There’s also another unresolved court matter in the Davis case.
Three months after Ross’s arrest, N.M. Davis Corp. sued him and his company for making fraudulent representations to secure the $2.5-million loan for his home renovation business, when the money was used to support his lifestyle.
In March 2012, Ontario Superior Court Justice Thomas Lederer ordered Ross to repay $3.2 million to Davis Corp.
“What could be more repugnant than murdering someone to avoid a civil responsibility such as adhering to the terms of a contract,” Lederer wrote in this decision.
N.M. Davis Corp. has received no payment and alleges, in another civil action that returns to court this week, that Ross fraudulently transferred his interests in the matrimonial home and two cottage properties to Wower.
A lawsuit alleges that the transfer was done “under the guise of a divorce proceeding, in order to defeat Davis Corp. from realizing on its judgment of more than $3,200,000 as against Ross.”
In other words, it was a “joint effort to shield assets from the plaintiff.”
N.M. Davis Corp. and the trustees declined to comment on the case.
Land registry and divorce records show Ross transferred the Sheldrake Blvd. property, bought in 2004 for $542,000, to Wower in 2011. Two months after the divorce became final, Ross entered his guilty plea.
Wower currently lives in the Sherwood Park home with her two children.
She runs a daycare there, where children are fed organic, homecooked meals, receive “nurturing personal care,” self-esteem building and participate in daily outdoor adventures and toddler yoga, according to a website for daycare operators in Toronto.
Wower did not respond to the Star’s request for a comment.
Glen Davis is a national hero in the conservation community.
He donated more than $20 million over 40 years to various environmental causes, helping to protect more areas in Canada than anybody before or after.
More than a financial backer, he was also a kindred spirit and fellow traveller.
“To the tribe . . . particularly anyone associated with protected areas advocacy, his contribution is very well known and acknowledged,” said WWF’s Hummel.
Hummel admitted it’s “a little bit frustrating” that contributions made by his longtime friend aren’t known more widely, but says he can live with that, knowing “what’s out there on the landscape thanks to Glen.”
But he and others wonder if the lack of broader recognition might stem from skepticism or even resentment about Davis, who was 66 when he died. “There may be some cynicism about Glen’s story because he was from a wealthy family, this kind of ‘oh, well he can afford’ ” to give away money, and “‘are we really supposed to feel sorry for someone who had all this privilege,’ ” Hummel said.
Tom Whealy, a business associate who first met Davis at university, believes there might be unspoken suspicions that there was more to the murder — despite an exhaustive police investigation that found Davis was squeaky clean.
“I have friends,” he said before stopping to correct himself. “I have acquaintances, longtime acquaintances who today still probably harbour . . . there had to be something wrong. There had to be something wrong.”
Whealy also wonders that “with the exigencies of time, maybe it’s not necessary” to raise Davis’s profile, that his accomplishments speak for themselves.
But he and others share mutual disgust that one of the terrible injustices of their friend’s death is that the circumstances around it have overshadowed his good work.
Keith Jones, who started out as Nelson Morgan Davis’s chauffeur more than 40 years ago and today manages N.M. Davis Corp., says Ross not only snuffed out Davis’s life, he robbed him of the recognition he deserved.
Rather than admire the fact he did more to protect land than anyone else, Jones said, people remember “that was the guy who was murdered by his nephew.”
Last Thursday, 10 years to the day Davis was killed, the WWF-Canada and CPAWS named Anne Sherrod as the first winner of the Glen Davis Conservation Leadership Prize.
The 70-year-old from New Denver, B.C., had a hand in ensuring more than half of all the protected wilderness in that province, a WWF spokesperson wrote in email.
She has lived for decades in a “crumbling, tiny home, where she’s known for wearing out computers unable to keep up with her output.”
Sherrod represents the kind of “worthy individuals” Davis helped finance over the years.
In an email statement to the Star, Sherrod detailed Davis’s financial support to her organization, the Valhalla Wilderness Society, which helped establish several parks and wildlife conservation areas.
“There was a really touching thing about Glen: when he funded environmental groups and activists, he wanted to take care of them personally,” she wrote.
The award honours “the spirit of his generosity,” she added.
“I am grateful, not only for the prize money, but for the surprise that after these 10 years have passed, I have been given the opportunity to help celebrate his life.”