Investigation brought to light life suspect hid from his family
Investigators clearly wanted to know more about Michael Morrison’s sexual interests, searching his suite for “sex magazines and pornographic material,” writes Barb Pacholik.
The part of his life Michael John Morrison kept hidden from his family for years is suddenly exposed as the Regina police probe into the deadly 1974 Rosedale Manor fire closes in on its key suspect. Check out Part 2 of the four-part series Suspicion.
The night Michael Morrison fled the flames and smoke filling Rosedale Manor, he wore dark pants, a white shirt, a navy or green V-neck sweater vest and shoes.
Maybe the shirt was dark-coloured or perhaps he also had a coat — depending who was asked. Why did anyone care? Because even before the ashes cooled at the devastating fire, the oft-described “fully clothed” Morrison was the primary suspect.
The alarm came in to the Regina Fire Department at 4:33 a.m. on Feb. 10, 1974, when most residents were asleep. The fire claimed three lives, and left a fourth forever changed, a severely burned sevenyear-old girl who endured years of surgeries to grow to a scarred, determined woman.
Morrison wasn’t in nightclothes — a red flag for investigators who believed they were on the trail of a serial arsonist or, in their words, “a fire bug ” whose latest blaze had turned deadly. Tenants also remembered seeing Morrison “fully dressed” — even in the same outfit — at other fires.
But that wasn’t all that fed suspicions. There was his arrival home shortly before the Feb. 10 blaze broke out in a storage closet, burns to his hands, and a failed polygraph test — “just too many little pieces,” in the words of one investigator.
But the 1974 case troubles Morrison’s sister, Margaret Scrivens, for different reasons.
In witness statements collected by police, one former tenant said she felt certain Morrison was “queer.” The woman’s sister-inlaw told police he gave her a creepy feeling and acted like “a fairy.”
Investigators clearly wanted to know more about Morrison’s sexual interests, searching his suite for “sex magazines and pornographic material.” Nothing was found, which an officer found consistent with suggestions Morrison destroyed the material to hide it from police.
A childhood neighbour claimed Morrison liked to do “sadistic things,” and had never indicated any interest in girls.
To Scrivens, such descriptions and repeated references to a social club her brother frequented fuel the family’s own suspicions — about why he became the key suspect.
As captured in a letter she sent to the Regina Police Service decades later, Scrivens maintains her mother told her a detective who came to their home after the fire called her brother “a f---ing homosexual,” and suggested “they like to start fires.” Morrison’s older brother, Randall, says the conversation is fixed in his memory because it was the only time he heard his conservative mother drop an f-bomb.
Until then, 22-year-old Morrison was still firmly in the closet to his family.
The third eldest of seven children born to Grace and Malcolm, Morrison was always a “nervous wreck” growing up — a stutterer, shy, fidgety, high strung and socially awkward, say his siblings.
“He was a very different kid,” says Randall, “didn’t really fit in.”
Morrison’s mother had told police he’d been unwell since childhood and spent time in the Munroe Wing, a psychiatric ward at the Regina General Hospital, under treatment for his nerves well into his teen years.
Bob Fairbairn met Morrison in the early 1970s at group therapy sessions in Regina. Fairbairn attended in followup to his “aversion therapy” — getting a jolt from an electrode on his arm if he showed interest in photos of men — to “drive it out of me.”
Feeling pressured to “not be that way,” Fairbairn then longed for a cure. “It didn’t work.”
Fairbairn remembers Morrison was “always very nervous.” He attended the therapy sessions for anxiety and depression — little thought seemingly given to what might be behind it until Fairbairn had a very candid conversation with his friend about his sexual orientation.
Even as he came out to his close friends, Morrison was silent about that part of his life to his family, keeping it in particular from his Catholic father. At least, he did until the revelation by police.
Randall admits he reacted with shock and shame, “horrified, as people were in those days” — an era far removed from Pride parades and human rights protection.
Winnipeg-born Fairbairn recalls an atmosphere of fear in the 1970s among many gay people on the Prairies. “You didn’t want people to find out … It was so in the closet that unless you were in the lifestyle, you would miss the cues.”
Gay sex remained a crime in Canada until 1969. A few days before coverage of the Rosedale fire, the Leader-Post carried a report of the American Psychiatric Association deleting homosexuality from its “disorder” category; it would instead be “a sexual orientation disturbance.”
Freud had linked pyromania to homosexuality in the 1930s, and leading psychiatric studies in 1951 and 1970 — since debunked — furthered the view that fire-setting and “sexual deviancy” went hand in hand.
Regina lawyer Jeff Deagle also believes Morrison’s homosexuality loomed large in the 1974 police investigation.
“It was quite surprising the way it was so freely mentioned and routinely mentioned, where it’s not relevant for any reason.”
Deagle reviewed the 1974 police files in acting for Morrison decades later. “It seems to be whenever describing him, there’s a reference to him being gay,” except the words were often less polite. “You wouldn’t dare try to use that language today,” he adds.
Putting the homosexual issue aside, Deagle still believes the 1974 case was circumstantial at best.
“To be honest, what struck me was the complete lack of evidence.”
Investigators thought the deadly Rosedale fire was the culmination of a pattern — of Morrison going out late at night to meet men, and setting fires on his return early in the morning.
In mid-January 1974, two vehicles behind Rosedale Manor caught fire about four hours apart during the night. Both times, one tenant saw a slightly drunk Morrison coming down the back stairs from the upper floor, where he lived. She and three other residents joined him on the top floor for a bird’s-eye view of the fire. Morrison watched “as if in a daze,” she told police.
On Feb. 3, 1974, a week before the deadly Rosedale blaze, fire broke out in the clothes closet of a vacant, basement suite, where Morrison had once lived. (Police searched his current suite for a key, but didn’t find one.) After a firefighter left to get equipment, a tenant saw Morrison, who had been out drinking that night, try to kick down the door, fall, get up and walk away. Morrison told police he awoke to the smell of smoke. He called in the alarm at 3:23 a.m.
Police also wondered about other fires, particularly ones at a house where Morrison had partied.
An orderly at Pioneer Village nursing home, Morrison often went out after his evening shifts and got home in the early morning.
As was his habit, he spent the evening of Feb. 9, 1974, at a Hotel Saskatchewan bar before going to the Odyssey Club. The rental house at 2242 Smith St. opened in 1972 as Regina’s first private social club for the gay and lesbian community. Morrison left the club with friends shortly after closing time at 3 a.m. and headed to a house party.
A cabbie picked up a drunk Morrison at that home and dropped him off at Rosedale around 4:20 a.m.
Thirteen minutes later, an alarm summoned firefighters to the Rosedale blaze.
Morrison told police he’d arrived home late, fell asleep and awoke to smoke. In the hallway, he saw the smoke rolling up the rear stairway, so he stepped back inside, dressed, and tried to leave again. But intense heat in the front and rear stairwells forced him back inside, he said. He smashed out a window, and awaited rescue on the ledge.
A nurse suggested Morrison wasn’t severely burned or suffering from smoke inhalation, which police found inconsistent with his version of events.
“I think the assumption was that the burns were more consistent, they thought, with somebody starting a fire and it flaring up on his hands … because of the use of an accelerant,” explains Deagle. “That was the theory.”
If a “fully dressed” Morrison is what caught investigators’ attention, Scrivens points out he wasn’t the only escapee in street clothes. At least 11 other residents told police of hastily pulling on clothing or coats before fleeing the fire for the winter night. A fire captain describes a teenage boy — “fully dressed in dark pants, red jacket, no hat, short black curly hair” — who tried to crawl back into his basement suite.
Disbelieving Morrison’s version of events, police gave him a lie-detector test six days after the fire. He failed, but precisely why is murky.
Questioned by police decades later, the polygraph operator, a former Mountie, admitted his notebook contains little about the exchange. One investigator in 1974 noted Morrison had answered falsely or incompletely to four questions, including whether or not he started the fire.
“Just because you fail a polygraph doesn’t mean you told a lie,” says Deagle.
Polygraph tests, which are inadmissible in the Canadian courts, infer deception by monitoring heart rate, blood pressure and sweaty hands for anxiety and stress reactions.
Deagle believes Morrison, nervous by nature, had much to be anxious about when he took that test.
“He was hiding the fact that he was homosexual … It was a lifestyle that was really frowned upon, so there was a lot more going on in him than this investigation,” says Deagle.
Police grilled Morrison for six hours after the polygraph. He was evasive on the subject of the Odyssey Club, but never changed his story of the Rosedale fire or said anything incriminating, according to police reports. Still, investigators believed all those “little pieces” built a strong case.
A senior Crown prosecutor thought otherwise.
Arnold Piragoff advised police the evidence was insufficient to prove arson at all. Even if it could be proven, there was no evidence Morrison had set the fatal fire or any others.
Ten quart-sized sealers filled with charred debris from a basement storage closet — the origin of the deadly blaze — were sent to the RCMP crime lab.
No trace of an accelerant was found, says the lab report, obtained by the Leader-Post through an Access to Information request. There was a significant amount of residue from burnt rubber, likely from stored tires.
Piragoff suggested if police could catch Morrison in the act or prove him responsible for at least one fire, they could try to prosecute him for other fires where he’d been seen.
Hoping to catch him setting a fire, police watched Morrison for months.
“I’d pick him up … and drive him home at 11 o’clock at night,” recalls his brother Don, “and the police would follow me all the way home.”
Officers on surveillance saw Morrison go to his parents’ house and to work. And they watched him meet with men in bars and at the Odyssey Club. But they never saw him start a fire. In February 1975, Morrison left Regina for a new start in Calgary.
To police, he looked like a man on the run. His siblings say he was worn down by the scrutiny, with police repeatedly questioning him, his family members, friends and employer. After his departure, the investigation into the Rosedale Manor fire faded and grew cold.
Three decades later, officers again had Morrison in their sights. SUSPICION CONTINUES FRIDAY WITH PART 3
It seems to be whenever describing him, there’s a reference to him being gay. You wouldn’t dare try to use that language today.