The Foulest of Murders

The Foulest of Murders: The Story of Grande Prairie's 1918 Unsolved Murder of 6 by Wallace Lloyd Tansem

Picked up this book at the Grande Prairie Farmer's Market a few weeks ago. I am always interested in local history so when I saw this and discovered there was an unsolved murder from the early part of the 20th century I just had to read it.

The book was published after the death of the author who had been researching this topic for a number of years. It is not so much a story as a collection of facts and transcripts of legal documents, police reports and newspaper articles revolving around the murders. At the time of the murders in 1918 it was big news as it involved two incidents. The first near Clairmont in which a man and his nephew were killed and their cabin burned to the ground in an apparent attempt to hide evidence. The second incident occurred three or four miles north-west and involved the death of four trappers who were in the process of moving out of the area to seek fortunes further south.


Both murders were determined to have occurred within hours of each other and the discovery of a revolver and a key chain at the second site seemed to link the two as being committed by the same person. All the murders appeared to have been committed with a gun apart from one who had had his throat slashed.

I'm not sure if the book was really ready for publishing at the time of the author's death as, I have described above it reads more like a list of events. It even goes into the details of the detective's expense account for a trip to Grande Prairie and some headlines describing prices on the front page of the newspaper. It was enough to raise my interest and it was a quick read. I finished it in a single day. It would probably take a second reading as I got confused as to the timeline a couple of times.

What I did take away from it was more of a sense of what like was like in the Grande Prairie region in the early 1900's. People were still fairly new to the area, homesteaders were living in simply shacks and trying to carve their lives out of the wilderness. Grande Prairie itself was barely pushing 500 people at the time. Getting around the area was in itself a chore and probably hampered the investigation further. A couple of times the detective cannot get out to the homestead due to poor roads. He has to rent a car and driver from the livery in town and apparently even the train took about two days to get here from Edmonton.

There is also a section on the formation of the Alberta Provincial Police force that was raised in order for the province to save itself the cost of the North West Mounted Police, forerunner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was interesting to read about some of the complications in that venture as well as things like poorly tailored uniforms and the dispersement of nine cars throughout Alberta for the police force to use. There was an interesting passage about how the APP in southern Alberta wanted to buy a Dodge because that was what all the bootleggers were driving at the time. With the more powerful Dodge the police figured they could better keep up with the bad guys and "you seldom saw one broken down by the side of the road". The experiment with the Alberta Provincial Police force ended some time in the 1930's, however the book prompted me to look more into this period of time. It would probably have a few memorable stories in itself.

In the end I would say it is a good resource if you are interested in pursuing this case further and perhaps coming to a conclusion of your own as to whom committed such a string of grisly murders in the early days of Grande Prairie. We often look to the stories of the old west in the United States and think what a violent and harsh world that was. It is interesting to note that there is history in our own back yard, maybe just a couple of kilometres from where you live!