The news that Richard Oland was dead, and apparently in suspicious circumstances, stunned many Saint Johners because Richard Oland and the Oland name were so prominent in the city’s history they seemed like permanent fixtures. The Halifax Explosion had brought the Oland family to New Brunswick. Richard Oland’s father, Philip Warburton Oland, known to everyone as P.W., was only seven years old on the morning of December 6, 1917, as he faced a blackboard in Sacred Heart School, learning the catechism in preparation for his first communion. The explosion at the harbour blew out the windows on the opposite wall of the room. P.W., uninjured, picked his way home through the ruined city. The family brewery on the Dartmouth side of the harbour was destroyed and several people inside were killed, including Philip’s great-uncle Conrad. P.W.’s grandfather, George Wodehouse Culverwell Oland, purchased the Red Ball Brewery in Saint John and chose as manager his oldest son, P.W.’s father, George Bauld Oland.
The Olands became brewers in 1867, when the family purchased a small Dartmouth brewery a few years after arriving in Halifax from England. Although the new venture bore the name John Oland and Son, everyone who met Susannah knew she was the driving force. Company history credits this formidable woman with developing the first recipes and instructing her sons in the art of brewing, and when John died in 1870, the brewery became S. Oland, Sons and Co. The company experienced its share of setbacks, and at one point Susannah had to give up her controlling interest, but the business flourished, expanded, and diversified, and when Susannah died in 1885, George W.C., the youngest but apparently the most capable of her three sons, became the dominant figure. His death in 1933 triggered a lasting split in the family.
George W.C. had five sons, three of whom — George, Sidney, and Geoffrey — followed him into the family business, and in his will he left each of these three a brewery. Sidney inherited control of S. Oland and Sons and Keith Brewery, plus a 21.8 per cent share in New Brunswick Breweries. George inherited the remaining shares in New Brunswick Breweries, and Geoffrey inherited Red Ball Brewery. George and Geoffrey both felt cheated, as Sidney’s breweries were larger and worth far more, and Sidney’s financial interest in New Brunswick Breweries placed George and Geoffrey in the unpleasant position of having to pay dividends and share corporate information with a competitor. The commercial rivalry and family bitterness endured for decades. In 1947, George Oland, seeking to expand his market beyond the province, changed the company’s name from New Brunswick Breweries to Moosehead.
George’s son P.W. grew up in Saint John and joined the family business as head brewmaster at age twenty-two, in 1932. He remained in the business for the rest of his working life, and he became the sole shareholder when his father died. He married Mary Howard, and they had two sons — Derek, born in 1939, and Richard, born in 1941 — and a daughter, Jane.
P.W. and his wife were civic-minded, a value they passed to their children. Mary Oland started the Rothesay Pony Club, while P.W. was a driving force behind the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra in 1965, was one of the founding members of the United Way of Greater Saint John, and was the first chair of the Greater Saint John Community Foundation, which since 1976 has donated millions of dollars to charitable causes in the community. P.W. served on many boards and committees. Philip W. Oland Hall at the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick is named in his honour, and he also lent his support to numerous arts organizations.
Richard — Dick, as his friends and wife called him — enjoyed a privileged upbringing. He was privately educated, attending Rothesay Collegiate School as a boy and boarding at Regiopolis College in Kingston, Ontario, for his high school years. He attended the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where, according to a story told at his memorial service, he lobbied the administration to construct a student union building. Oland was persistent in his appeals to Colin Mackay, president of the university. “I understand he bothered Dr. Mackay so much that his father was called,” Pat Darrah, one of his closest friends, recalled. P.W. asked if the campus needed a student union building, and Mackay said it did. P.W. advised Mackay “to let Dick work on getting a SUB built.” Oland graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a bachelor of arts in 1966. He obtained a certificate of brewing technology at Wallerstein Laboratories in New York before joining the family business.
He was smart and capable. While at Moosehead, he helped design and build a beer packaging line that was one of the world’s fastest and most efficient. At his memorial service, Pat Darrah described the innovation as “well-researched and thought out” — classic Oland. “Research and efficiency were two of Dick’s key strong principles,” Darrah said, also noting that “the manufacturer would have never expected that a corporate executive would be so hands-on during its installation, needing to know the intricate details and indeed, making suggestions on how they could do it better.”
Oland became vice-president of Moosehead and served in that capacity until he left the company in 1981. He went on to run several other companies, including Brookville Transport, Brookville Carriers, Brookville Manufacturing, Kingshurst Farms, and, most recently, Kingshurst Estates, a woodlot and property rental company, and Far End Corporation, his personal investment-holding company. Oland served on Rothesay’s town council and was a director on the boards of several firms and organizations, including the St. Stephen–based chocolatier Ganong, Eastern Provincial Airways, Newfoundland Capital Corporation, the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in Saint Andrews, and the United Way of Greater Saint John. He was also involved with development agencies — such as Enterprise Saint John, the Saint John Development Corporation, and the Waterfront Development Committee — served as chairman of ParticipACTION, and was a life member of the Miramichi Salmon Association.
Pat Darrah, the executive director of the Saint John Construction Association, felt Oland’s true legacy was his tireless efforts to bring the Canada Games to Saint John in 1985. In the early eighties, the city struggled with disinvestment and an unemployment rate of 15.8 per cent. Oland knew hosting the games would mean the construction of new sports facilities, and he believed providing recreational infrastructure for youth would give them better opportunities in life. “I believe that this project was one of his greatest thrills and greatest accomplishment,” said Darrah, who worked alongside him for six years as vice-president. The fourteen-day event attracted more than three thousand young athletes and their families to the city, and the extensive media coverage gave Saint John national exposure, showcasing the stunning river views at the cleverly chosen venues. Oland also established a cultural component, Festival by the Sea.
“When Dick was hatching a plan, he had an impish grin. As the plan rolled out, he was all business,” said Darrah. “One of Dick’s favourite sayings was, ‘Get a clean piece of paper and I will just go over a few points we should endeavour to get covered today.’” Darrah remembered some “bumps in the road” and “trying times,” but under Oland’s leadership, the Saint John event was the most successful edition of the national amateur sports competition — and it ended with a profit of $2 million. Oland used the surplus to create the 1985 Jeux Canada Games Foundation to support young athletes and sports organizations across the country. Twenty-five years later, the Canada Games Stadium and Canada Games Aquatic Centre continue to serve the region. “Only once does a city our size have a chance to show what we can do,” Oland said at the closing ceremony. “I believe we have done it.”
Oland’s community involvement did not end with the Canada Games. He served as president of the board of the New Brunswick Museum in the 1990s, spearheading a significant reorganization, renewal, and expansion that saw the museum’s exhibits moved from a deteriorating 1930s building on Douglas Avenue, in the city’s north end, to a more inviting and accessible site at Market Square in Saint John’s uptown. Oland hobnobbed with Prince Charles at the 1996 opening of the museum’s new exhibition centre. Oland also developed a program of touring exhibits to showcase the province’s history.
“He was certainly driven,” remembered Jane Fullerton, the chief executive officer of the museum. “He was passionate. He was focused on getting things done. He had an ability to bring people together and to get them to work together.”
The day before his death, Oland was working on his next community project. He and Darrah met with Bishop Robert Harris of the Diocese of Saint John to discuss a capital campaign to raise an estimated $10 million to restore the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The historic landmark on Waterloo Street, one of the few structures that survived the Great Fire of 1877, opened in 1853 after thousands of Irish Catholic immigrants flooded into the city, making it New Brunswick’s first Catholic cathedral. It needed a new roof and repairs to the exterior sandstone and interior plaster walls.
Oland’s community work and contributions to public life earned him many awards over the years, including Sport New Brunswick Executive of the Year, Transportation Person of the Year, an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick, the Rotary Paul Harris Fellowship, and the Saint John YM-YWCA’s Red Triangle award. Oland was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian orders, in recognition of his “creation of cultural and recreational opportunities for his region,” as the governor general of Canada’s website notes. “His devotion to the community has borne fruit in many forms and he has distinguished himself as an entrepreneur with a social conscience.” Oland credited his appointment to the work and community spirit of the countless volunteers who contributed to his many successful projects (approximately seven thousand contributed to the Canada Games alone), but he took particular pride in the honour, because it was also bestowed on his father in 1970 for his “services to the community in many different fields.”
In more recent years, competitive sailing became Oland’s passionate pursuit. Skimming the water with the wind snapping his sails was a lifelong love, one that began as a nine-year-old boy on a small boat on the Kennebecasis River and progressed to ocean racing around the world on the 52-foot state-of-the-art carbon fibre yacht he ordered from New Zealand and dubbed Vela Veloce — Italian for “sail fast.” At the time of his death, he was having a new boat built in Spain and had listed the Vela Veloce for sale for $850,000.
“The last three years, he took it to a new, very high level — a level where very few Canadians go,” said Darrah. Oland participated in nine of the ten events in the 2010 US-IRC National Championship, a series of races spanning the east coast of the United States from Florida to the Caribbean over a ten-month period. Oland had the highest-standing average of 134 participants, and he earned the Canadian Sailing Association’s International Sailor award. Ben Bardwell, a professional sailor and member of the Vela Veloce crew for about two years, described Oland as the best boss he ever had. “He certainly had high expectations, but he built such a great team,” Bardwell said. “He was the leader and you know, we loved him, and we had just such a great dynamic, such an intense but comfortable dynamic, on the team. It’s just sad. It was a great run we had with Dick.”
But Oland’s family, Darrah said, was his true “pride and joy.” He started dating Connie Connell, when she was only sixteen years old. During their courtship, he would take her across the Kennebecasis River to Long Island, where they would picnic and spend the afternoon together on the beach. Connie pursued a teaching degree in the 1960s but dedicated herself to her family. Both her contemporaries and the friends of her children praise her as an unfailingly gracious and kind-hearted woman and mother. The couple’s only son, Dennis James, was born on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1968. His childhood was, by all accounts, filled with love. Connie was “a very nurturing individual who was always very attentive,” and his father ensured he received the best care money could buy for the 45 per cent hearing loss he was born with. At a young age, Dennis was sent to Toronto to attend speech therapy. He was also fitted with hearing aids, and the interventions proved successful. Dennis was able to play unencumbered with his older sister, Elizabeth (Lisa), and younger sister, Jacqueline, with whom he had close relationships, and the other children in their affluent Rothesay neighbourhood. Dennis’s godmother, Margot Doyle, remembers him as a “quiet and polite little boy.” Anne and Michael Bruce, who have known him for forty-five years, described him as “kind, mild-mannered, and a truly gentle soul.”
“Each time Dick and I got together, we would have a catch-up session, a brief discussion about how things were with Connie, the children, and what they were doing,” Pat Darrah said. “He had a wonderful bond with them and an active relationship. Family events were Team Oland events.”
It was an idyllic time, when children could chase adventure all day as long as they were home before dark. And in Oland’s family, there was always adventure. Richard Oland, whose mantra was “Go for it” was always planning activities for his young family. On winter weekends they headed to Poley Mountain near Sussex, where the three children learned to ski, with their father at their side, helping them hone their skills and taking them down “the steepest hills,” as Dennis later recounted. Oland enjoyed downhill skiing with his wife and he, “one for always raising the bar,” would challenge her to higher and more difficult hills. “Connie might have rolled her eyes once in a while,” Darrah recalled, “but [she] proceeded to enjoy the day.”
The Olands were also horse enthusiasts. In the winter they galloped on horseback across the frozen Kennebecasis River and up the trail to Minister’s Face to enjoy the snowy view. “So you can imagine how exciting that was,” Dennis said. Richard and Connie’s daughters particularly shared their father’s love of horseback riding. He was “always helping them along to improve their skills in equestrian events. He would encourage them to try the next jump a little higher up. Again, raising the bar,” said Darrah. “They would make it over the jump, but even if they knocked it down a few times, he would insist they kept trying and indeed they did.”
In the summers, the family could be found on the river, boating and swimming and enjoying bonfires on the beach. Dennis loved the outdoors, especially being on the water. Some of his fondest childhood memories involve time spent on the family’s boat, Aloma II. “With my father as the captain, you could always count on a big adventure for every trip, and he never let us down,” Dennis wrote in an essay presented to the Royal Kennebecasis Yacht Club after an electrical fire destroyed the Aloma II in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2008. The 60-foot motorboat, with a distinctive canoe stern, had been part of the Oland family since Richard’s grandfather purchased it in 1947. The vessel, like the family, had a long and proud history. Built in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1910, as a 45-foot sailboat, she was lengthened in 1923, converted to a motor vessel, and renamed the Aloma II. In 1939, she was called to service in the Second World War and served the Royal Canadian Air Force as a supply and rescue boat. In 2000 she was part of the Tall Ships Festival in Halifax, and before being sold in 2002, economic development organizations, such as Enterprise Saint John, used her to wine and dine potential investors, courtesy of the Oland family. “Dad knew the boat better than anyone, and he was certain to make sure that I learned all I could about the boat and the river,” Oland wrote in his tribute, which was posted online. “And what an adventure it was. If there was water, we went there. And if there wasn’t, we sometimes tried anyway.”
Dennis took sailing lessons and boating turned into a lifelong interest. Under the tutelage of his father and grandfather, according to his cousin and friend Andrew Oland, he became an expert on every tributary, island, and hazard on the Saint John and Kennebecasis Rivers. One windy day, when Dennis was twelve, his father handed him the helm and told him to steer the boat ashore, which he managed to do on his first try. “I was as proud as any twelve-year-old could ever be,” he wrote. At around that same age Dennis learned to operate a front-end loader at his father’s quarry, Brookville Manufacturing.
Dennis became a self-professed “gearhead” with a fascination for vehicles and all things mechanic. It started when he was very young, playing the game “Name that Car” on road trips. He was also his father’s helper with his seemingly endless mechanical tinkering over the years, fixing and maintaining everything from washing machines and stoves, to cars and boat motors. “I was glued to his side as a kid,” Dennis remembered. When Dennis was nine and something went wrong with his motorbike, his father suggested he take it apart and fix it himself. “Many hours of work, a few days later, after numerous consultations and suggestions, Dennis had his motorcycle back together and he knew how it worked,” recounted Pat Darrah. The motorbike also served as a financial lesson. Richard Oland purchased the bike, but Dennis got a paper route and paid him back in instalments. “He helped with every motorcycle after that,” Dennis said, “with me paying over time.”
Father and son sometimes toured back roads and fields in a 1970s GMC four-wheel drive pickup truck. One day, they got stuck in a mud hole. “No tow truck would do — and no truck was called,” Darrah said. Instead, many hours later, covered in mud, the pair made it home. Darrah quoted Dennis’s observation that “It didn’t take long for us to understand what Dad would expect us to achieve or push ourselves to achieve: the very best.” As the children grew older, the challenges got bigger. “As a team, they would strive to do their best, and Dick would help them along to do a little better,” said Darrah. “Team Oland understood what was expected of them.”
Despite the many material advantages their father’s wealth afforded them, Dennis and his sisters were expected to pull their weight. They were assigned chores around the home. They also helped with stabling horses at the Rothesay Pony Club, operated by their grandparents, P.W. and Mary Oland, at their nearby estate. Dennis even assisted with chores at his friend Val Streeter’s house. The boys, who lived just a few hundred yards apart, had been friends since they were five years old. “From day one Dennis and I were inseparable,” recalled Streeter, who describes himself as Dennis’s “best friend,” a term he doesn’t use lightly. “We slept and played at each other’s houses. We went to the same school. We skied together in the winter. We boated together in the summer. We went to Camp Glenburn together. We took horseback-riding lessons together at his grandparents’ farm. Ask anyone who resided in Rothesay in the 1970s, and they would certainly remember our duo.”
Susan Streeter, Val’s sister, agrees the two were “virtually inseparable.” “Perhaps because each was ‘saddled’ with only sisters, they became fast friends,” she said. Whatever the reason, Dennis was also like a brother to her. He was “quite simply, always around. He accompanied our family on ski trips and summer weekends,” she remembered, “and my parents generally accepted him as an addition to their own four children.” When Val and Susan’s sister Sarah died in 1981, Dennis served as a pallbearer.
Dennis attended Rothesay Collegiate, his father’s old school, for grades six through ten; in the years since Richard was a student, the school had become closely affiliated with the all-girls school Netherwood and is now known as Rothesay Netherwood. Also like Richard, Dennis went to boarding school, although in his case it was only for the eleventh grade. He attended a boarding and day school, Bishop’s College, in Lennoxville, Quebec, where he was a cadet officer and head of a unit. He also participated in sports and leadership training, his mother later wrote. Missing his family and friends, Dennis returned to New Brunswick and attended Saint John High School for twelfth grade, where he was respected and well liked, according to Jill Oland, who attended high school with him and later married his cousin Patrick. The Reverend Canon James W. Golding, chaplain at Rothesay Collegiate in the 1970s, remembered Dennis as a “kind and caring” person who “learned the values of hard work…loyalty and great friendships.”
Dennis impressed people as likeable and unpretentious. Jill Oland notes that he “makes friends easily and is fun to be around.” Dennis “goes out of his way to make people feel important and that they matter,” said Gord McNamee, who has known him since kindergarten. “Just like the rest of the Oland family, there is no pretense with Dennis. He is down to earth and approachable.” Reverend Michael LeBlanc, a friend and confidant of the Oland family after more than twenty years as their pastor, observed that although Dennis was “brought up in what some would call a life of privilege,” he had “a sense of compassion and understanding of others.”
LeBlanc attributes Dennis’s ability to relate to others to the summers he spent working and residing at the Saint John YMCA’s Camp Glenburn during his teens. Located on the shores of Belleisle Bay on the Kingston Peninsula, about forty minutes outside the city, Camp Glenburn is New Brunswick’s only non-denominational overnight camp. It boasts thirty wooded acres, a sandy beach, and lots of opportunities for outdoor exploration. Between 1983 and 1987, Dennis, whose camp nickname was “Brewer,” served as a counsellor-in-training, counsellor, and canoeing instructor. He eventually became canoeing director and maintenance worker, and even served as camp director for a few weeks when he was eighteen, until they found someone to fill the position, according to his mother. “It’s just fantastic. It’s a wonderful spot,” Dennis remembered. “He really enjoyed his time there, learning new skills, and made lifelong friends and memories,” said his sister Jacqueline Walsh.
Scott Wardle said he reaped the benefits of Dennis’s friendship in 1986, while attending the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton with him. “Dennis was so careful to make sure I knew everyone and always made me feel at home,” said Wardle, who was from Toronto. They shared many common interests — as well as a shared distaste for peas and Brussels sprouts, “a vile food group” — and became “fast friends,” he said. “I cannot count — or recount, for that matter — the number of ski trips, sun trips, and road trips that Dennis and I shared during those school years,” Wardle later wrote. “Dennis and his family always made me feel welcome in their home. These were the best years of my life.”
Dennis remained close to Val Streeter throughout university. They both studied political science, rented a house together, and booted around in a beater Volkswagen Beetle Dennis bought for $500. It was a wreck, Dennis remembered, and his father wouldn’t let him drive it until he paid to fix it up. Richard Oland occasionally went to Fredericton to see Dennis and take him out to dinner, and in the summers Dennis worked for his father as a dispatcher at Brookville Transport, his trucking company, “very often on the night shift,” as Connie Oland recalled.
Dennis graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1990 and worked for Moosehead Brewery in the maintenance department for a few months before moving to Halifax to attend Dalhousie University. After a term, however, he got a job selling household water treatment systems. During these years Dennis met Lesley Phinney, who would become his first wife, and Val Streeter met the woman he, too, would marry. “Both women attended Dalhousie and were great friends themselves,” Streeter said. The two couples moved to Toronto in 1991, and both men got jobs in the investment industry. Richard Oland made some phone calls, and Dennis got a job in the mailroom of RBC Dominion Securities. Within four years, Dennis rose to stockbroker’s assistant. “We saw each other constantly during our Toronto years,” Streeter said. Dennis also became a “fixture” in the family of his UNB friend Scott Wardle, who had moved back to Toronto. “He was welcomed into my mother’s home as long as he cheered for the Jays.”
Despite living in Toronto, Dennis still joined his family for their annual ski trip. After four years in Toronto, “the Maritimer in both of us called us home,” said Streeter. They returned to Rothesay with their girlfriends, bought homes close to each other, and became investment advisers. Oland worked for Richardson Greenshields and married Lesley in 1995, with Streeter serving as his best man. Two years later when Streeter married his wife, Dennis was in the wedding party. Between 1996 and 2000, Dennis and Lesley had three children: Emily, Hannah, and Henry, named for his paternal grandfather’s middle name.
Up until July 6, 2011, Richard Oland and his family seemed to live charmed lives, at least to many outside observers. True, Dennis and Lesley divorced in 2009, but he was now happily remarried. Approximately two weeks before his death, Richard Oland had chartered a private plane from Rhode Island to attend the one-hundredth birthday of Connie’s cousin, Marg Bourne. After the celebration, the Olands and some of Connie’s family gathered at Dennis’s home to view photographs from a recent trip to England. It was “a very happy time,” Connie recalled. Richard and Dennis planned to get together when Oland returned from a fishing trip to talk about the family genealogy project they were working on. Oland returned from that trip in a “great mood,” and he and Connie went out to dinner that night with her visiting family. The next morning, he left for work, and Connie never saw him again.
But all was not quite as it seemed. The relationship between father and son was fraught with tension. Beneath his boyish and affable exterior, and despite his father’s wealth, Dennis Oland kept hidden his increasingly dire financial situation. And Richard Oland had another, less exalted side, one that the police investigation would fully expose in the days and weeks to come.