The Bad Johner

Bear with me. This account is about a murderer best understood in context.

The tale, or true telling, starts out in Saint John, New Brunswick. Saint John, not to be confused with St.John’s Newfoundland, is a city on the east coast of Canada that used to be on a par with Boston, due to its forests, shipbuilding and year round ice free port. Times change, as they say, and it has shrunk spectacularly. The town now visibly relies on tourism brought by cruise ships, but more realistically, heavy industry courtesy of the Galon family.

The Galons came early on from Scotland to export the forests of New Brunswick and in time to develop the port, the oil refinery, the pulp mill and everything else, as well as owning all the media so that no-one could say anything about it. To this day there’s nothing the family doesn’t own or have fingers in. Johners revere or revile them depending on their degree of dependence.

One Galon employee was Robert Callaghan, the central character in the murder story. Bob was a descendant of the Irish that escaped to Saint John during the Great Famine. If they didn’t die on the boats on the way over then many found their uncomfortable end on Partridge Island, a quarantine station founded in 1830 to prevent smallpox spreading from a ship carrying Irish immigrants.

This was seventy years before Ellis Island was built. The American quarantine station is now a thriving tourist attraction. By contrast, Partridge Island lies in disrepair and no-one is allowed to go there. Local boys sometimes sneak out there when the tide is out. But that is by the by.

Back to Bob, who started out with a weighty chip on his shoulder at the urging of his father and grandfather. He remained personally aggrieved that his forebears were driven off the land by the English Lords and the famine, subsequent smallpox, and on arrival, violence from the Protestants who’d imported their historic grievances with them. In Bob’s mind, he was among those outraged and fighting back against the Orange men trying to claim dominance by parading through the Catholic ghetto in Saint John. The Callaghans, Murphys and Suttons weren’t having that. Riots ensued.

His Irishness, Bob believed, was the reason he was born without and still had nothing. The teenage years only fanned his dormant anger and it was in this ignorant uneducated state that he took the inevitable job at the oil refinery. This was where he learned about and came to resent the fabulously wealthy Galon family.

Robert Callaghan might have developed into a relatively normal human being if it wasn’t for the explosion. The corroded forty-year old pipe ruptured without warning discharging a flammable mixture that ignited. Nearly two thousand workers were on site that day, just under two hundred of them injured as a result of falling or running away from the fire, noise, psychological stress and smoke inhalation. Bob was one of the ones that felt the bump, heard the boom, ran for his life and never went back. While the scars of others were visible, for some reason the explosion knocked any sense of stability out of him and rage found its way into his brain and heart.

He knew nothing about this until a while later when an opalescent dark blue Jaguar cut him off twice on the highway. Bob found himself swearing, pounding on the steering wheel and speeding to catch up with the car. Closer now he could see it was very new. Monied prick. Bob maintained his distance following the car into town and a parking lot surrounded by high brick walls. The man looked confused as Bob approached and came face to face with him. Bob explained, or rather screamed, his outrage. The man paled and backed up, raising his hands in apology. He hadn’t seen him. He was so sorry. Bob knew the man was sincere and could have let it go at that. He had no reason to continue and could walk away. But as the man waited and watched he walked to the trunk of his car, took out the car jack and returned to thrash him. Bob felt pleasantly avenged as he drove away looking in his rear mirror at the red splayed figure unmoving on the ground by the open Jag door. That would be the last time anyone would lord it over him.

Hence began Bob’s spree. There was no modus operandi that might assist in profiling, then in its early stages. Bob would have truly liked to despatch the Galens, but knew that would cause attention. He just had to vent his rage on someone. He had no way of knowing who he was going to choose, or why, or how he was going to kill them, the only consistent factors being timing and method of disposal.

This is where geology came in. Saint John, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, had the world’s highest tides. This was a thing that drew tourists and was widely touted, so that even Bob knew about it. There was a bridge over the Saint John River leading out to the Atlantic Ocean where twice a day the tourists could observe the falls beneath in actual reverse. Apart from the stupendous view, Bob realized this could be a serendipitous way of disposing of a body. Equally serendipitous, there were no houses nearby as the bridge was directly adjacent to the parking lot of the Galon pulp mill. Bob could time his nefarious disposals with the outgoing tide. At night, lights brightly illuminated the bridge for road traffic but security cameras, as few as there were then, pointed in towards the mill and parking lot. There was so little traffic in the early hours Bob could comfortably stop in the middle of the bridge unobserved and heft his cargo over the side into the gushing falls.

It was mostly men that triggered him; the smallest inadvertent slight fermenting into justification for why they did not deserve to remain on this earth. On long term disability due to PTSD caused by the refinery explosion, he had all the time in the world to traipse around after them on foot or accelerate his car to catch up and follow them to their homes. They customarily did not bother to lock their doors even when they went out, so he could wander around in their homes to get a sense of his quarry. Sometimes he would pocket small personal things that caught his eye, but nothing valuable. He was no thief. Then he waited and watched for an opportunity.

There were very few murders in Saint John. Known murders that is. By the time the Atlantic Ocean and its inhabitants were done with the bodies, they would be non-existent or grossly unfamiliar. And given that he gravitated towards single middle aged men as being the most egregious, there was no hullabaloo about people going missing. Mostly everybody knew everyone else, and if there was the occasional murder it could be attributed to a domestic or out of towners. One could easily avoid either.

However, given time the Saint John Police Department did notice and allocated someone to investigate a handful of disappearances. While looking into those, others surfaced. The mayor was privately notified but there would be no press release to alarm residents, or more importantly tourists from the cruise ships. The last thing needed was talk of a serial killer. Elsewhere they would have worried about a reporter catching on, but as the media was all owned by the Galons, news and editorials were carefully controlled so as to exclude anything that would deter tourists and impact the local economy.

One day something led the police to leave a message on Bob’s phone. The request to come in to talk to them jarred Bob. He’d never been top of his class, or near the top at anything, so he was acutely aware he might make mistakes and inadvertently hand the police something incriminating. Accordingly, he chose not to risk talking to them, instead resolving to completely erase himself and begin again. Without telling his landlord, he packed up, moved out and changed his phone number. Ruefully one night he released the trinkets over the reversing falls.

Bob could not control his urges but now would be more careful. He started by reassessing the predictability of his targets. He’d tended to focus on the men and been too kind and understanding to women. Some had been out and out bitches to him. Greeters that didn’t greet; some that didn’t bother to say thank you or even meet his eye while he held the door open, just waltzing through as if he was some kind of lackey…pulling out without a backwards glance after he’d stopped to let them out in traffic. Bonus was they’d likely be easier to manage and dispose of. Women wanted equal rights. He’d give them justice.

* * * * *

Bob is still living but has changed his name. We don’t know what he looks like or anything else to avoid him or get him locked up. Is he old, young, tall or short, dark or light? Probably white as he’s of Irish descent but that’s little to go on. He may or may not have moved away from Saint John. He may have taken a job: meter reader, postman; city worker; shop assistant, or may still be on disability. You may inadvertently bump into him in the mall, a fellow shopper. A man may hold the door open for you or stop to let you out into traffic. Of course you do always lock your doors…