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On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson
returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine
months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy
because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he
was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people
living in the house on Melville Street could have slipped the
poison into the mixture of Epsom salts and beer that Jackson took
on the morning of his death. Reporters from Vancouver's newspapers
chose Jackson's teary-eyed, fragile, 24-year-old wife, Theresa, as
their first choice for the guilty party. Then as the days went by,
their preference shifted to the dead man's steely-eyed,
light-fingered, American mother-in-law, Esther Jones. Suspicion
also fell on the two boarders--Esther's nephew Harry Fisher and
Ernest Exall. All of them had the opportunity to plant the poison.
Eventually the police followed up on the newspapers' revelations,
the most important being that Harry Fisher was not Esther's nephew
but her son. Fisher fled to Washington, and in his absence his
mother and sister were arrested--not for murder but for perjured
testimony at the coroner's inquest. What followed was a series of
hearings and trials in the city's courtrooms with fledgling lawyers
trying to make their names in combat with the celebrated defence
counsel Joseph Martin, KC. At the same time the newspapers, which
were locked in a deadly circulation war, tried desperately to trump
each other with juicy bits of information, all of it splashed on
their front pages week after week.
In the end the two women served time in the BC Penitentiary, but no
one was ever tried for the murder of Thomas Jackson.
Acclaimed writer Betty Keller has based her sensational story of
murder and intrigue on actual events that occurred in Vancouver's
pre-World War I years.
Set in Vancouver in 1907, "Better the Devil You Know" is the
outrageous tale of three unique and curious characters: the
small-time con man who passes himself off as an evangelical
preacher, the scrawny street-worker whom he reluctantly befriends,
and the five-year-old hellion left in his care by a former lady
friend.
In the course of their adventures, these three misfits become
involved with a larcenous lingerie salesman, a Klondike miner bent
on recovering his stolen poke, a madam intent on revenge for past
wrongs, a pugilistic lady barkeep, two doctors determined to
acquire a cadaver of their own, a handful of incompetent and
corrupt cops, and a piano teacher with reforming zeal. The pace is
riotous, the action continuous, and nobody--good or bad--ever gets
a break.
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Julienna (Paperback)
Sylvia Nichols, Betty Keller
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R161
Discovery Miles 1 610
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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