His brother mailed them a bomb — and this B.C. couple will never find out why
Roger Nepper opened a package bomb, sent to his wife by his dying brother.
PORT ALICE, B.C.—There were no fingers when Roger Nepper looked at his right hand, just “a piece of flapping skin.” So he had to use his left hand to pat out the flames on his stomach.
This past September, Roger was in the upstairs washroom of his home in Port Alice, a secluded village on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.
He was opening a parcel sent to his wife, Shirley Bowick, who watched a few feet away. The return address only said “Whitehorse, Yukon.”
Bowick thought the box might contain the ashes of Roger’s brother, Leon Nepper, who lived in the Yukon. Leon’s health had been deteriorating; Roger and Shirley hadn’t heard from him in weeks and thought, perhaps, he had passed away.
Instead the package exploded, blowing a hole through their lives.
The walls and floor of the washroom were painted with blood. Smoke hung in the air as Roger wrapped his hand in paper towels and darted out the door looking for help. The burns made his head look “like a Brillo pad.”
Shirley, 67, called 911, not realizing until later her body had been seared by shrapnel. The bomb also damaged a nearby urn holding the ashes of her late son.
Days after the explosion, Leon was arrested in Whitehorse. Crown prosecutor Ludovic Gouaillier told the Star that police had traced the package back to the 73-year-old. A second bomb was discovered in his truck, RCMP said, and
officers found other materials “consistent” with bomb making.
“Leon always was a mean bastard,” Roger, 70, told the Star, as the retired couple broke months of silence on the case.
But that doesn’t begin to explain why Leon attacked his brother and sister-inlaw who took care of him when he got sick and again when he lost his home. It also remains a mystery how an ailing senior, who supported himself by doing a variety of jobs in the North, managed to craft such a sophisticated explosive device.
“A lot of people, you know, they just surmise this or that,” Roger said. “I don’t even know the reason why he did this.”
He doubts he’ll ever know. Charged in mid-September with a number of offences, including attempted murder, Leon died less than two weeks later in jail. The case was subsequently closed by prosecutors and police. Roger said police never allowed him to speak to his older brother after the arrest.
Gouaillier said there isn’t much about the case on the public record because it didn’t go to trial. All he knows is that “it’s a tragedy from one end to the other.”
“Mr. Nepper’s death is tragic in the sense that not only did he pass away, but there was no chance to see some formal closure by having this matter heard by the courts,” Gouaillier said.
Up until a six-week silence before the explosion, Roger said, the two were close and spoke on the phone often. There was no falling out, no historic grudge.
The pair grew up boxing. Roger once held a golden-glove title for Vancouver Island.
Their father, an immigrant from Luxembourg, was a bare-knuckled cage fighter in his own youth. He trained his sons to box while they grew up in Nanaimo, where they founded a boxing club. They travelled B.C., exchanging punches with rival clubs in the name of Nanaimo.
Roger became a mason, moving to Port Alice in 1983 and starting a boxing club there for local youth. Leon took another path. In the1960s, Leon would often mill about Nanaimo cafés trying to pick fights, Roger recalled. At age 18, Roger said, Leon served eight months in jail for assault causing bodily harm.
Friends from the era had similar accounts.
“You can go back to when they were both young,” said Brian Zelley, who grew up boxing with the brothers and kept in touch with Roger. “Roger was always popular and a good guy and all that. Leon was rough around the edges.”
Zelley recalled a street fight during which Leon kicked his opponent in the face, nearly taking out his eye. He was “not a nice guy,” he said.
Leon eventually moved to the Yukon and supported himself with a variety of jobs about an hour outside of Whitehorse.
Upon reading the first story on the bombing, Zelley said he suspected Leon was the culprit. But, like Roger, he can’t comprehend a motive.
“It’s crazy, man. You talk to anybody, and it’s crazy,” he said. “Why Roger? Of all people, he’s the last one you’d want to hurt.”
In 2005, Leon was diagnosed with throat cancer, and a procession of health problems followed. Roger and his wife stepped up to help.
The Star visited the couple’s home in late January. A few hours in, the kitchen was filled with the smell of scotch eggs cooking for lunch.
From a nearby cupboard, Roger extracted a stack of log books detailing his brother’s medical progress, expenses and conversations they had. The books helped Roger ensure Leon was taking care of himself and following his doctors’ instructions.
“You never phone him when it’s patch day,” Roger recalled, pointing to one entry. Fentanyl patches eased the pain of Leon’s ailments but made him incoherent.
In 2013, when Leon’s house burned down due to a faulty chimney, Roger and Shirley took him in for months. Roger flew up to the Yukon to help him with the legalities of rebuilding, as Leon wasn’t equipped to handle it himself. Leon stayed with them again for a year in 2015-16 while getting medical treatment. They drove for hours every month, bringing him to appointments on Vancouver Island.
Leon sold his rebuilt Yukon home when he wasn’t well enough to live there anymore and offered his brother $135,000. Roger said he turned it down at first but eventually accepted a sum of $15,000 to help pay for the cost of Leon’s stay.
Roger was made executor of his estate. Leon applied for assisted death but was rejected, he said.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Roger gripped pages of a photo album using his thumb and the side of his hand. Each flip reveals snapshots of him, his brother and friends during better times. One group shot has Roger standing behind Leon, hamming it up with a beer in his hand.
The couple never saw things ending this way when Bowick promised the brothers’ mom years earlier to keep an eye on Leon, who was always a worry for her.
Bowick was close with her mother-inlaw and wanted to keep the promise after her death. So, she convinced Roger to contact Leon, whom he hadn’t spoken to in a decade, and build a relationship.
At their first meeting she thought he “seemed like a really wonderful man” who was going through hard times.
“When I first saw him, I gave him a big hug; he’d never met me,” she said. “And when he left I just broke down crying in front of him.”
The two got along well for a time, but something changed. Bowick wonders whether mental illness played a role, but no proof has arisen. Roger hesitates when asked; as far as he knows, his brother was fine.
But, in retrospect, Roger said, Leon darkened in the years leading up to the bombing. It might explain why the package was addressed to Bowick, though he can never be sure.
“Here’s a guy who always drank a lot, made his own moonshine and everything and sold his moonshine up there,” Roger said. “At the end, the last five years, he started to hate people that drank, and the last little bit he started to hate women ’cause, I know, he had all these problems with women.”
Bowick said she felt it too, just before Leon left the couple’s home for the last time. He became aggressive, accusing her of trying to alienate him. She recalls him chuckling in a disturbing manner at tragedies on television, such as mass shootings in the United States, or during “psychotic parts” in movies.
“His deranged laughing made me really nervous,” she said. “That was, to me, a warning sign.”
Bowick is convinced Leon addressed the bomb to her because he knew she often opened her mail in her car after picking it up from the local post office. Leon wanted her dead, she said, though the reason why eludes her.
She’s furious the case is closed and thinks more people were involved. She said Leon wasn’t computer savvy and would have needed someone’s help to learn to make a bomb. But RCMP in Whitehorse say there is no evidence to suggest Leon was working with someone else.
James R. Fitzgerald is a retired FBI agent who played a key role in capturing Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. Over nearly two decades, Kaczynski maimed two dozen people and killed three via letter bombs before his arrest in 1996.
Fitzgerald said mail bombers are a “unique” kind of criminal because they are often more intelligent than the average offender. They have to be, he said, to construct a bomb without blowing themselves up in the process.
Leon’s ability to build an improvised explosive device (IED) and have it detonate when opened, rather than en route or during construction, shows he was a “proficient” bomb maker, he said.
“None of these guys is successful on their very first device,” Fitzgerald said. “Leon no doubt had some practice runs with these IEDs.”
Robert Dick, the lawyer who acted as Leon’s duty counsel after his arrest, said he never spoke to him about the case. Dick said Leon was “old and weak” due to his illness but seemed mentally sound.
“I don’t think there was any issue of his ability to understand the procedures,” he said.
Fitzgerald said many bombers learn to make their devices via the internet, but prior to its development there were reading materials like The Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous guide from 1971.
As for motive, Fitzgerald pointed to depression, anxiety and paranoia as potential contributors to a mail bomber’s actions. He stressed the package being addressed to Bowick is a pretty clear piece of the puzzle.
“When an offender is this target specific, puts this amount of time, effort and preparation into committing such a violent crime, he would be the outlier to have not had some very specific motivations for harming this woman,” Fitzgerald said.
Bowick and Roger said they spoke to friends of Leon in the Yukon who knew nothing of his plans or of any ill will toward them. None of Leon’s friends asked by Bowick and Roger would to speak to the Star.
Aside from one crooked drawer in the washroom and dings on the door, the bomb’s damage to the home has been cleaned up — but Roger’s body still tells the story.
Dried skin flakes from the rounded-off tips of his three half-fingers. A rough maroon patch on his stomach, where the blast drove nails into him, is still healing.
Roger, his voice steady, said he’s given up on getting answers. All he can do is try to shut out the emotions and ignore his need for closure.
“I try to forget it all the time, I do. I really try to erase it from my mind completely,” he said. “I do it, especially when I go for hikes with my dog or out walking. It’s gone.”
For Bowick, it hasn’t been as simple. She’s “very fractured,” she said, and has taken a limited amount of counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder. But the closest counsellor who can work with her is a four-and-a-half-hour drive away in Nanaimo.
Meanwhile, she has to fend off the psychological impacts any way she can.
“I have dreams all the time — all the time — of him in our bedroom,” Bowick said. “I have to turn on the light to sleep a lot. It’s not good.”
Even with help from victims’ services, the cost of care and travel is high, and the white-knuckled drive on Highway 19 through Northern Vancouver Island causes too much strain. So Bowick goes without regular counselling. This year she was hoping to see her grandchildren, who lost their father to cancer recently, but the couple can’t afford the trip anymore.
Living in their Port Alice home, they are surrounded by reminders of that day in September. Leon’s belongings still take up space in the closets and cupboards. They wrestle with the crooked drawer in the washroom often.
After hours spent retelling their story on a grey afternoon, TV news chattering in the background, Roger stared down at the pile of photos on his table. All these memories have been tainted by an act of violence so extreme it will likely never be understood.
For the first and only time, his composure broke.
“I still don’t know why. Why me? Why Shirley?” he asked, raising his voice. “We didn’t do nothing to you. All we did was help.”