Identical families but strangers
New documentary tells the unusual story of cop gone bad John Hanmer
John Hanmer was a cop, a skilled undercover operator. He came from a family of Hamilton-Wentworth police officers.
His father, Murray, was an inspector. His older brother, Michael, was a decorated sergeant who busted drug traffickers. His sister Cathy patrolled next door in suburban Halton.
Something happened, and John was forced to resign from the police. It was political, Michael says.
Soon he did the unthinkable: John joined a biker gang, the notorious Satan’s Choice, one of Ontario’s toughest at the time. He became an enforcer, and he excelled.
“He turned out to be one of the heavyweight members, well-respected,” his younger brother Paul recalls in a revelatory new documentary film that premières Saturday at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
But there was a problem, Paul told Toronto-based filmmaker Chelsea McMullan. His brother “had a habit of taking other people’s money.”
A cocaine deal went sideways. John double-crossed an associate, taking $30,000. He fled to Thailand in 1988, never to return to Canada. He abandoned his wife and two children, Michael and Shannon Hanmer, leaving them to fend for themselves in Dundas, a Hamilton suburb. They rarely heard from him; they rarely spoke of him. They never saw him again.
John made enemies in Southeast Asia. He allegedly joined the Mad Dogs, a Thai motorcycle gang. In 1998, his local “business partner” was reportedly stabbed to death with an ice pick.
Two years later, while motorcycling around the Philippines with his 18-year-old girlfriend, he was ambushed and shot to death, apparently by underworld rivals toting M-16 assault rifles.
The chilling execution made headlines back home.
“An ex-Hamilton cop murdered in the Philippines had twice been warned Thai business rivals were out to kill him,” the Hamilton Spectator reported.
No arrests were ever made. The unsolved murder is one of the enduring mysteries that surround John Hanmer. But it’s not the story that preoccupied filmmaker McMullan: She discovered another family secret.
John had married a Thai woman. With her, he raised, then abandoned, two more children. Like their Canadian half-siblings, their names are Michael and Shannon.
Two separate places and cultures, two families, four children with the same names. Fathered by a Canadian cop gone bad, then murdered. The Canadian offspring knew almost nothing of their Thai relatives. They didn’t know they had identical names.
Encouraged by her mother, “Thai Shannon” finally con- tacted “Canadian Shannon” on Facebook.
When she heard from her half-sister and learned fragments of the Hanmer family story in Thailand, “Canadian Shannon” was incredulous.
“He actually named them Michael and Shannon,” she says in the film. “That took a while to sink in. How was (John Hanmer) presenting this information to other people? … Maybe the whole thing was just a joke (to him), like when people name their dogs ‘F--k You.’ ”
But she and her brother Michael were curious. Last year, all four Hanmer offspring gathered in Thailand. McMullan and her film crew were there to record that first encounter.
It was an extraordinary, difficult meeting, like “an exorcism of a father’s ghost,” McMullan says. “It was a surreal experience. They’re from totally different worlds. How do they begin to have a relationship?”
Her documentary, Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John, raises more questions than it answers. McMullan says she was “attracted by the idea of taking a seemingly pulpy, sensational, Hollywoodesque story and peeling back the layers one at a time, until I reached its centre. And at the centre of this film was a family drama about communication and unresolved familial relationships.”
Hanmer’s four children have reacted differently to their strange circumstances, and to one another, and to their father, the wandering ex-cop criminal. There is some bitterness.
“He had absolutely no impact on my life,” says “Thai Michael,” speaking into McMullan’s camera. “None whatsoever. … Even now, I still feel like we were abandoned.”
“Canadian Michael” is more reticent; he was less inclined to look into his father’s past, and decided not to accompany his sister to the Philippines, to the spot where he was murdered.
“Canadian Shannon” was determined to make the trip, and to try and discover just what had happened.
“I needed to know,” she said in an interview this week from Toronto. “I don’t let things go that easily.”
She wanted to speak with people who knew her father, people who were aware of what he’d been doing. But in the Philippines, she was told to back off.
“In a very kind way, by someone who knew him, I was told to stop asking questions about my dad,” Shannon said.
No one has been held accountable for her father’s murder. But Shannon says she feels satisfied, knowing more of her half-sister and half-brother. They all keep in touch, despite a language barrier.
In Thailand, Shannon Hanmer attends university. Michael Hanmer is training to be a police officer. It’s the family business; policing is in his blood.