unnecessary wiles and villainies

Janet Smith was 21 when she took a position as the nanny of wealthy Frederick and Doreen Baker’s baby daughter.

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The Bakers were among the social elite in Vancouver. They lived on the fashionable West Side, then moved in May 1924 to the exclusive Shaughnessy Heights neighborhood.

Their Chinese houseboy, Wong Foon Sing, became infatuated with Janet Smith, giving her presents such as a silk nightdress. Although her friends would later testify that she feared him, her diary would reveal that she enjoyed attracting men.

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On 26 July 1924, Point Grey Police Constable James Green was called to the house. Wong claimed he had heard what sounded like a car backfire; in the basement he found Smith’s body. There was a bullet wound through her temple and a .45 caliber revolver near her right hand.

ivory handled colt 45 found here

Green picked up the weapon, making it impossible to obtain fingerprints from it. Despite there being no bullet, blood or brain tissue on the walls, no powder burns on her face (suggesting she had been shot from a distance), and the fact that the back of her head had been smashed in, Green concluded that she had committed suicide. 

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Undertakers were summoned, and instructed by both the coroner and the police to embalm the body, likely eradicating any clues that it might have yielded, for instance whether Smith had been sexually assaulted. It was the first time the undertaker had embalmed the victim of a violent death without a postmortem. He found unexplained burns on Smith’s right side but a jury bought the scenario that had Janet interrupting her ironing in the basement to walk upstairs to the attic where the gun was kept, carrying it back down to the basement and, holding the pistol at arm’s length, somehow shooting herself in the head.

Steve Martin ironing a kitten found here

Friends pressured the provincial government and Attorney General Alexander Malcolm Manson to reopen the case. The Vancouver Star, a scandal sheet published by Victor Odlum, was quick to pounce on the affair.

The body was exhumed on 28 August and a second inquest held. This time the jury concluded that Smith had been murdered. Manson appointed a special prosecutor, Malcolm Bruce Jackson.

Suspicion immediately fell on Wong, the only other person in the house when the crime was supposedly committed. In the 1920s, persons of Chinese descent could not become Canadian citizens, which meant they could not join professions such as medicine, architecture or law. They were barred from public swimming pools and restricted to the balconies of movie theatres. The Star published several articles in late July and early August in which it portrayed Wong as the likely killer.

read about this Chinese swimmer here

Victor Odlum was an “exclusionist”; he believed that Asians could not assimilate with whites and had run on an anti-Asian platform in the 1921 federal election. In August, he published an editorial called “Should Chinese Work with White Girls? He called for legislation to “preserve white girls of impressionable youth from the unnecessary wiles and villainies of low caste yellow men”

Bruce and Bolo found here

Interest gradually died down, until on 20 March 1925, Wong was kidnapped by a group of men dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes. They proceeded to torture their captive for six weeks, trying to elicit a confession, but Wong refused to cooperate. On 1 May, he was released.

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A scandal later developed when it was discovered that the kidnappers included “two Point Grey police commissioners, the chief of police, a detective sergeant and three prominent officials of the city’s Scottish societies.” One man pleaded guilty to kidnapping. A detective and his son were also convicted, but the jury gave a “strong recommendation of mercy”. The Point Grey policemen were acquitted, the government controversially barring prosecution of the others.

Meanwhile, Wong was put on trial for murder. In October, the case was thrown out of court due to lack of evidence. Wong went back to work for the Bakers. In 1926, he left the country for Hong Kong.

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Other theories gained popularity. According to one rumor, Smith had been raped and murdered at a wild party at the Baker house by wealthy playboys, who then bribed the authorities to cover it up. Writer Ed Starkins proposed Frederick Baker as the killer, portraying him as a drug smuggler. Some even claimed the killer was the Prince of Wales, who had recently popped into Victoria incognito, using the title Earl of Renfrew.

Prince of Wales and Mountbatten found here

A few years ago, a history student going through former attorney-general Manson’s private papers found a copy of a letter that was sent to Janet Smith’s parents in London.

It said their daughter’s killer had committed suicide in 1925 in a private New Westminster sanatorium known as Hollywood Hospital. Police had not arrested the killer, Manson wrote, because the publicity would have shamed the family of the lieutenant-governor.

Hollywood Hospital found here

That points to Jack Nichol, the playboy son of Lieutenant-Governor Walter Nichol, who was also the publisher of The Province. The only problem is that Jack Nichol did not die in Hollywood Hospital. He died in Victoria in 1941, more than 15 years after Manson wrote to Janet’s parents.

Gloria Steinem as a Playboy bunny found here

Constable Green left the Point Grey police force in 1926 and bought a half interest in a downtown hotel. The gossips always claimed, with no proof, that the money he used to buy his share was hush money from Frederick Baker, Janet Smith’s employer.

By April, 1956, Baker had moved to Qualicum, on Vancouver Island. On a visit to Vancouver to see his doctor, Baker checked into the St. Regis Hotel. He was in the room with a Doris MacAuly when, as MacAuly would tell police, he suddenly said, “I’m suffocating,’’ opened the window and climbed out on the fire escape.

Despite MacAuly’s attempts to hold him back, the 65-year old Baker then tumbled 15 metres to the sidewalk. Baker had checked into the hotel under the name L.L. Smith.