The mystery of the pianos found in a B.C. warehouse
On June 21, RCMP in Richmond, B.C., made an unusual announcement. They said they had uncovered a stash of about a dozen pianos — from small uprights to concert grands — in a warehouse and were asking owners of “missing” pianos to contact them.
The public appeal invited obvious questions: How do pianos go missing? Were they stolen? As of late last week, the RCMP, while confirming that some pianos had been reunited with their owners, were saying little about their investigation, other than they haven’t ruled out possible criminality.
The National Post has been able to piece together this much about the baffling case: a good handful of piano owners placed their pianos — some of them treasured family heirlooms — in storage only to discover they’d gone missing when they tried to retrieve them; the moving and storage company in question recently dissolved and has an “F" rating with the Better Business Bureau; and a private investigator has recommended the RCMP pursue a criminal investigation.
“I’ve never heard of anything so bizarre in my life,” Grant Hayter-Menzies, one of the owners whose piano is still unaccounted for, said last week.
The warehouse is located in an industrial park in the south end of Richmond, a Vancouver suburb. Last week, dozens of empty, mostly Yamaha-brand cardboard boxes sat outside the warehouse as RCMP began to clear it out.
The RCMP were tipped off to the warehouse earlier in the month by Denis Gagnon, a private investigator and exRCMP officer, who was hired by one of the disgruntled piano owners. He has since come to learn of at least five others.
Their connection? They all used a moving and storage company called KM Keyboard Moving. Its website has shut down but archived pages show that it told prospective clients, “we will place your piano safely where you want it when you want it.” The company also at one point advertised itself as being “the piano moving company selected to handle moving the Team Canada 2010 grand piano at the Olympics.”
Corporate records show ever since the company underwent an ownership change in the middle of 2015 it hasn’t submitted an annual report and is now “in the process of being dissolved.”
Hayter-Menzies is among its unhappy customers. He is the owner of an 1887 Mason & Hamlin screw stringer upright that used to belong to his grandmother. “Her name was Gertrude Launspach, and it was she who had a family legacy of music stretching back to the time of J.S. Bach,” he said.
Hayter-Menzies said he arranged for the company to put the piano in storage when he moved from Victoria to New Westminster in the spring of 2016. This past March, as he was preparing to move back to Victoria, he phoned the company to arrange for its delivery. But the person on the other end said the company no longer existed.
He said he was able to track down a young man who had been connected with the company by phone, but he stopped returning calls.
“I’m not saying they stole these things, but it constitutes theft when they don’t tell you what they’re doing with your property,” HayterMenzies said.
He said one of the piano’s keys bears his teeth marks from the time he chomped on it as a 2-year-old.
“In a way, it’s like (the piano’s) been taken hostage somehow. It makes you angry, very sad.”
Cynthia Loveman, of Vancouver, is also feverishly trying to locate her piano, a Yamaha grand that her parents bought for her in 1971 when they lived on Long Island, N.Y. Loveman said her parents “scrimped and saved” to buy it and it was the centrepiece of their home.
“It’s got an incredible sound ... a warm, emotional tone. And the action on it — the degree of expression you get out of it — is outstanding,” she said.
On the curve of the piano, there’s a distinct triangularshaped chip — a “birthmark,” she says — from the time the family cat knocked over a lamp.
Loveman said she arranged for the piano’s storage through the owner of a Vancouver piano dealership in 2015. In late 2017, as she prepared to move into a new house, she sought to have it delivered — but it couldn’t be found.
Like Hayter-Menzies, Loveman said she got a hold of someone from the company by phone, but he stopped taking her calls.
A few weeks ago, Loveman managed to convince the landlord of the warehouse to let her in to view its contents and was heartbroken when none of the dozen or so pianos inside was hers. She’s contemplated a number of scenarios: could her piano be on a cargo ship abroad? Is it sitting in someone’s living room in Richmond?
“It’s a horrible wound,” she said. “I need to have an answer.”
Court records show that KM Keyboard Moving has been the subject of recent litigation. Its landlord sued the company last fall for about $18,000 for unpaid rent and other costs. The company countersued alleging the landlord had failed to provide adequate care and control of the facility after a pipe burst in December 2016, causing flooding into a unit that contained some pianos.
Until a few years ago, KM Keyboard Moving occupied space at CDS Ltd., a Richmond-based warehouse and distribution services operation.
A CDS receptionist told the Post she estimates that upwards of 15 people have walked through the doors over the last year or so looking for their pianos. “It’s really sad,” she said. She provided a name and three phone numbers for the last contact they had for KM Keyboard Moving but they either didn’t work or the person who answered said it was a wrong number.
The Better Business Bureau confirmed that KM Keyboard Moving has an “F” rating, in part because of the company’s failure to respond to a complaint about a missing piano.
Gagnon, the private investigator, said his office reached a couple of people connected to KM Keyboard Moving but got little co-operation from them. He is convinced this is more than just a case of a company that went belly up and ditched its inventory.
The National Post made multiple attempts to try to reach someone from the company for comment but was unsuccessful.
Late last week, the National Post learned RCMP had taken an interest in some storage lockers at a second site in Richmond that contained even more pianos, giving the owners hope that their missing pianos might be there.
Then the owners were sent into a panic when they learned the public was able to bid on the units — and their contents.
The RCMP declined to even acknowledge to the Post the existence of a second site, but an email sent by an investigator to Hayter-Menzies said: “Please be assured that the pianos will not be allowed to be auctioned off.”
For now all the owners can do is wait.
“I had a dream … that I walked into a warehouse and found it,” Hayter-Menzies said. “Hopefully that comes true.”