AFTERWORD

“Any resemblance to persons living or dead …”

Though I practised mainly as a criminal defence counsel, I was on occasion retained by the Attorney-General of British Columbia to prosecute homicide trials, some of which attracted wide public attention.

The trial featured in the opening section of this novel roughly recreates one of them, an alleged thrill killing in Vancouver of a lonely down-and-outer.

The accused was John Wurtz, a bright young man visiting from Toronto. On his journey west, he’d been absorbed in The First Deadly Sin, a popular thriller by the late Lawrence Sanders, whose mentally warped serial killer uttered musings like “The murder of a stranger. A crime without motive … The act of killing is an act of ultimate love.”

Morbidly inspired by such ruminations, Wurtz befriended the victim, a stranger to him, and found himself accused of a copycat murder, his quarry stabbed 56 times with a pair of scissors. The only evidence putting Wurtz at the scene of the crime, a humble West End flat, was a single print on a beer bottle on a window ledge.

The chief Crown witness, Wurtz’s travelling companion, had originally cooperated with the police, but at trial changed his story, supporting Wurtz’s alibi. That involved a mysterious third man who’d shown up in the flat, the victim’s jealous male lover.

The trial was a difficult one, well defended, but after a strenuous cross-examination of the accused, the jury convicted.

As Wurtz, in handcuffs, was led past the prosecution table to begin his life sentence for first-degree murder, he paused by my chair and audibly whispered, “Some day, Mr. Deverell, I’m going to get you.”

This, from the Vancouver Sun, is the last I heard of John Wurtz:

Convicted of stabbing a homosexual playmate to death, John Richard Wurtz is now leading police on another, final run-around.

Dubbed the “thrill killer” back in 1976 for killing the closet Vancouverite homosexual he had picked up while cruising Granville Street, Wurtz, 24, later vanished from a Kingston, Ont., jail.

Now police are puzzled by the mysterious delivery of ashes said to be his remains to his eastern Ontario family from a Florida crematorium.

Or, are they his ashes?

Because there is no body to exhume, positive identi­fication cannot be made.

People who were close to Wurtz are unwilling to con­fess to police that he is in fact dead. That could open up charges against them of harboring a known criminal.

So, for the time being, police must consider Wurtz, described as a bisexual, alive and the case still open, even though they think he’s dead.

“We are reasonably certain that he is dead but we can’t say conclusively without the help of others who are obviously reluctant to co-operate without a guarantee that they will not be charged,” a Kingston police source says.

Court testimony in Vancouver had shown that Wurtz had talked to a homosexual friend about killing someone just for the thrill of it. He had later returned home with teeth marks on one leg.

Police picked Wurtz’s fingerprints from a beer bottle in the dead man’s West End apartment.

Rui Flores Romao, 44, a janitor, “had been stabbed at least 56 times” with a pair of scissors.

(Vancouver Sun, December 1984)

Incidentally, a truer version of the actual trial, based on a script I wrote, “Death of a Stranger,” was broadcast by CBC Radio in its Scales of Justice series, produced by the power duo of the late, great Edward Greenspan, QC, and best-selling novelist Guy Gavriel Kay.

William Deverell