ROWER RETURNS, MYSTERY REMAINS

Vanished after admitting fraud to friends

Harold Backer walked back into the world on Holy Thursday 2017, more than 500 days after he disappeared on his bicycle, slipping away from the world without warning, leaving a host of his closest friends wondering what he did with their cash.

Backer, a three- time Olympic rower, disappeared in Victoria, B.C. on Nov. 3, 2015. He was last seen days later in Port Angeles, Wash., just over the U.S. border. And then, for almost 18 months: nothing.

At least until Thursday, when he appeared again from nowhere to turn himself in to Victoria police.

Backer’s reappearance has rekindled a mystery that has consumed Canada’s small, elite rowing community. A beloved teacher, coach and father, Backer was, by his own admission, living a parallel life in the 16 years before he vanished.

He’s in a jail cell now, facing two charges of fraud over $5,000. But the mysteries at the heart of his story remain. Where did he go for all those months? How did he keep his secrets so long? And why, having slipped the bounds of consequence, did he ever return at all?

Like Backer, Kip McDaniel, rowed for Canada’s national team, one of the most decorated, and proud programs in the world. He can remember the day in 2015 when he heard the news.

“One of my old teammates, who I’m still very good friends with, phoned me up and said ‘Harold’s missing,’ ” said McDaniel, a B.C. native who lives now in New York.

Backer, according to accounts published at the time, told his wife he was going for a bike ride on Nov. 3, 2015. He never came home.

Instead, investigators later learned, he boarded a passenger ferry to Washington State, rode off on the other side, and then just faded away.

At first his disappearance was treated as a tragic mystery. Rowing friends from his Princeton days joined locals in a desperate bid to find him. But it soon became clear that Backer was trying not to be found.

“I’ve known Harold a long time, and I remember hearing that he was a financial adviser, and it struck a chord,” said McDaniel, who writes about finance for a living.

“Something just didn’t sit quite right,” he continued. “He wouldn’t be the first financial adviser to disappear.”

It turned out McDaniel was right to be suspicious. Before he vanished, Backer wrote a letter to clients of his personal investment company. In it, he admitted to a bizarre and convoluted deception.

Backer told his clients, including several Canadian rowing legends, that he had lost a fortune of their money in the dot-com crash in 1999. But rather than own up to his mistakes then, he tried to hide them, hoping he could make up the difference down the line. Eventually, his letter claimed, it all became too much.

“Moving forward to today, I am aware that I am running a pyramid investment,” he wrote in the letter, first published by the Victoria Times Colonist. “My investors have been my friends, and I have done a terrible thing to my friends.”

As the details of the story leaked out, the shock in Backer’s social circles grew. Backer attended, and later worked at, the prestigious Brentwood College School, on Vancouver Island. He went on to Princeton before rowing for Canada at the 1984, 1988, and 1992 games.

McDaniel, who wrote an investigative piece about the saga for Chief Investment Officer magazine, believes Backer used connections from all of those worlds to build his doomed financial business. His alleged victims included several former teachers, colleagues and coaches.

“He basically managed the money for the people closest to him,” he said. “He saw these people every day for 15 years while running this thing. That is the thing that I think bothers every single person who touches this story the most.”

McDaniel said he’s thought about Backer’s disappearance almost every day for more than year. He even scoured the reader data on his story, looking for repeat visitors, hoping he could hone in on Backer’s location. He never came close.

Instead, Backer turned himself in, ending one story, but leaving several others dangling.

“He’s sitting in a jail in Victoria somewhere,” McDaniel said. “But there are people all over that city, and from what I’m hearing, all over the country and all over the rowing world now wondering what the story is. What has he been doing since November 4, 2015?”

Backer is due back in court on Tuesday.