Beau ‘Bear’ Jackson was a brash aggressive young lawyer; he had graduated from UBC Law School in 1973 at the ripe old age of 23 and had from an early age announced to anyone who cared that he was going to be a criminal lawyer. He knew he was wet behind the ears, a long, long way from ready to be a criminal defence lawyer. But like so many young lawyers Beau was arrogant, sure of himself in that unearned unaware single mindedness that is so often the hallmark of the young. He didn’t know what he didn’t know but that was not going to stand in his way.

By the time he graduated he’d been a prison guard at the notorious Oakalla prison in Burnaby BC and a cop with the Victoria and Vancouver Police Departments and had at least scuffed off some of the naivete he had been born into. Beau ‘Bear’ Jackson was called to the bar in 1974, the same year Hank Woods had been shot dead.

He did well, gaining a reputation as an aggressive, tenacious defence lawyer. What he lacked in intellect he made up for with an uncompromising fight and courtroom flair. His reputation in the circles in which ‘bad guys’ moved, flourished. You may not win but he’ll give you one hell of a fight was it turns out good press.

Beau’s career as a criminal defence lawyer took off and he was getting calls from all over the province. He was hungry for it all, taking cases wherever they took him, spending over two hundred days each year in court.

The first he heard of Joe Stokes was in 1981 when Ted Horning, a great criminal lawyer and his mentor, asked him to join his team on an appeal from a first degree murder conviction. This man Stokes had shot an old prospector in the Yukon and his family wanted to appeal the conviction. If we won, a new trial would be ordered.

Beau was in with both feet.

The first order of business would be to get an order for a new trial and that would not be easy.

On these facts it would be a daunting task, the legal equivalent of what Klondike prospectors faced as they stared up at the infamous ice steps at the Chilkoot Pass.

There is a right of appeal in Canada when a man is convicted of first degree. Philosophically, our criminal justice system strikes a bargain: If we as a society are going to take a man’s freedom for life, we must be certain that the right verdict was made, and to be certain we must test the decision. That is what appeals are for.

In order for the rule of law to work, to essentially ensure we live in a law abiding society, all of us, ordinary everyday citizens have to trust that the system works, that it is fair and just. Appeals help to ensure that happens. 

But it would not be easy. The appeal courts rarely contradict jury findings on the facts and in any event, in this case both lawyers had agreed on the facts, agreed that Joe Stokes was the killer. In fact they had gone further, agreeing with the trail judge that he should give the jury just one choice to make: On these facts was Joe guilty of first or second degree murder? The difference was significant: first degree and incarceration for life, or second degree and as little as ten years in jail.

Both crimes were murder but only one involved a cold, calculated plan to take another man’s life. The other, second degree was an intentional homicide no doubt but usually something that happened in the moment, in a fit of rage and hatred. Stokes had said time and again that he was going to kill Kulan. Was that evidence of planning and deliberation or more the explosive, uninhibited eruptions of a man who had descended over the years into a dark place, stripped of all the behavioural controls each of us needs? On the facts of this case, did the trial judge explain that question properly to the jury?

Even now medical science knows relatively little about the human mind. In 1976 that was even more the case. What could possibly lead an otherwise law abiding old prospector to snap like that and commit an act of unimaginable violence.

What happens to cause such a break, a lapse into a dissociative state, unshackled from the usual restraints against violence, freeing the human mind from our inbred evolutionary inhibitions? What happened to the learned societal restraints against violence we impose on one another in our quest for a lawful society? Medical science is on the frontier of discovery but a century from now we will no doubt see how much we didn’t know. That question was at the heart of the appeal.

Was Joe’s dissociative state of mind defence adequately presented and if it was did the judge explain it properly and understandably to the jury. That was his job and it is never easy but unless the trail judge does that, no jury can be expected to make the right decision. Boring stuff perhaps but a man’s liberty was in the balance.

If the appeal court agreed, we would get our new trial. We filed the appeal and waited. The decision came down six months later.

There would be a new trial.

The appeal court agreed that the jury had not been given a proper instruction on second degree murder and without that the jury would not have been able to consider Stokes’ defence. An order for a new trial was the only remedy.

The second trial of Joe Stokes on a charge of first degree murder began March 8, 1982. Now in cases like this, when a new trial was ordered on such a serious charge, the Crown was represented by a federal prosecutor from Ottawa, one of a team of experienced trial lawyers who would parachute in to lead the prosecution team.

Beau first heard from Stanley Gallagher by phone, “Mr. Jackson, I’m the federal prosecutor on the Stokes case. What are you doing with this thing? It has no business going back to court. Stokes is as guilty as they come.”

He wanted to let Beau know that he was angry, angry ‘on behalf of the people of Canada’, “This is all incredibly expensive and nothing will change. I’m going to convict him again!”

“Give me second degree murder and I’ll plead him. My client was a broken down old prospector. He harboured years of anger and resentment and it broke him. He didn’t plan to kill Woods, he simply snapped. That’s second degree. Give me second!””

Gallagher was furious, “Over my dead body” he said not without a trace of irony, “Everybody knew he was planning to kill Hank Woods, he’d said so many times.” his voice rising with his frustration.

And there it was. The question. The question at the heart of this second trial.

“Well, I suppose as the saying goes, I’ll see you in Court,” Beau replied, knowing full well he was poking the beast. He had nothing to lose and directing the prosecutor’ energy at him was always fruitful in this line of work.

Beau arrived in Whitehorse on a Sunday, the day before Joe’s second trial was to begin. He had been receiving the Whitehorse Star for several months and knew the paper had followed the appeal and order for a new trial with interest, exclaiming with each editorial opinion that this whole thing was wrong.

Joe Stokes had a fair trial and was convicted by a jury of his peers! This is a travesty of Justice. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. They can order new trials for as long as they like but it will change nothing. Stokes is guilty and should die in jail.

Beau had every newspaper with him when he arrived back in Whitehorse. He quickly learned how unique it is; rich in history, richer again in the cast of characters who have made their life in Whitehorse and the Yukon.

He was booked into the T & M Hotel downtown for the duration of the trial.

“Fifty dollah, next goal?” Tippy Mah, the Chinese proprietor of the hotel pointed to the TV. The Canucks were playing the Chicago Blackhawks in the NHL playoffs. Beau took the bet of course. And lost $50, of course; but that short exchange announced that he was in for one of the most memorable six weeks of his life.

The Yukon would change him as it had changed so many who came before. That is what that magnificent fortress does to ordinary people. It was in many respects the same for everybody who chose to live in this wild, hard place.

Tippy Mah had come to the Yukon fifty years earlier, absorbing the hardships that came with life in the north as down payment on the riches he would discover; his resilience tested and proven and with modest ‘winnings’ from years of back breaking work searching for gold, Tippy bought a hotel. He renamed it the T & M, and lined his office shelves with at least two dozen small gold nuggets, testament to a life lived hard.

By this time in 1982 Beau Jackson had been a defence lawyer for eight years and was still punching above his weight, not really ready for the heavyweight legal bout he was about to embark on. But he didn’t know that and even if he did he was deaf to the message. Beau was here and that’s all that mattered.

He had some time before dinner and he wanted to get a feel for this town so he decided to give himself a walking tour. Beau had heard about the Sourtoe Saloon long before he’d ever set foot in Whitehorse. They had a Sourtoe Cocktail that was infamous around the world: one ounce of liquor in a shot glass garnished with a human toe. Didn’t count though if the toe didn’t touch lips. He had to see it for himself.

“You’re not from around here are ya’ mister”, the voice from the bar was part welcome, part who are you?

“No, I’m in town for the Stokes trial. I’m the defence lawyer.”

“That fuckin’ piece of shit. He should hang for that. Woods was a good man. How can you defend that guy?”

And into the ‘straight shootin’, no bullshit, say what you think, do what you say’ world of Whitehorse, Beau was drawn.

Desi ‘Shrap’ Farmer was from Sacramento California in the heart of the Central Valley and he was a Vietnam vet. He’d served two tours of duty, got a Purple Heart after he was injured during the Tet Offensive in ‘68 and still carried pieces of shrapnel in his hip as some sort of constant reminder. Typical of the bond between men who go through tough times together, his army buddies had given him the nickname ‘Shrap’; he wore it like a badge of honour.

Beau had come a different route to end up in Whitehorse. On the face of it these two men had nothing in common. Beau had known some American boys from his high school years. He’d graduated from the University School for Boys in Victoria BC back in 1967. It was a private school and a lot of American families sent their sons there.

Beau had never forgotten how gutted he had felt when he heard the news. He was in first year at the University of Victoria when word came. His high school friends Flint, Mickleson and Mathers were dead. They had been taken in the draft right out of high school and shipped off to Vietnam  in 1968 to fight a pointless war in some God forsaken part of the world.

They were eighteen and dead in some remote country, sent there to stop the spread of communism. Just a few months earlier Beau could recall, they had been his teammates, playing on the schools First XV, winning the high school rugby championships and celebrating.

That had been the first time Beau had a fierce argument with his father, a hard man who had served proudly in WW2, fighting so bravely in the jungles of Burma. He would not sit by and listen to his son challenging the authority of the United States to wage war. For his part Beau, raged at the waste, his anger stoked each night by the legendary Walter Cronkite who opened the CBS nightly news with the body count of young Americans killed in that war.

That body count would reach over 65,000 by the time it was all said and done. 65,000 young American boys dead on a battlefield, far from home, three of them his schoolmates from Victoria.

“How’d you end up in ‘Nam?”

“I volunteered” offered Shrap. “It was inevitable. My people are Republican from way back. My father served, his father before him, there was never any question that I would go to Vietnam and I was proud of that. It’s what us Farmers had done since the Civil War, proud warriors for Uncle Sam. I couldn’t wait to show those gooks and the world what American military might meant.”

“I hated those fucking anti war hippies back then. Me and my high school buddies would drive over to Berkley and beat on them when they protested. It felt great. They were anti American shit, far as we were concerned. I can still remember wailing on some poor kid while the cops just sat back and watched.”

Beau remembered those times, although he was witness to it all through a TV screen. The 60’s had been one of the most violent decades he’d experienced; he was eleven in 1961 when the world came within minutes of a nuclear war as the US and Russia played some weird game of Russian roulette during what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK, RFK, and MLK were all assassinated, at Kent State young scared National Guard soldiers shot and killed four protesting anti war students, race riots set every major US city ablaze, and riot police brutally beat protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. All of it played out nightly on national TV.

It had gone on and on. And as the Vietnam War grew through the decade the anti war movement drew an entire generation to the streets in protest, dividing America in ways it had not experienced since Abolition a hundred years before. They had been frightening times.

“How did you end up here in Whitehorse” Beau wanted to find out more about Shrap.

“Actually I did two tours, re-upped in ‘70 and then I went back to ‘Nam’. But I went back different. I’d been sent state side for some leave between tours but the America I had left, the America I was fighting for in Vietnam had changed. The country I grew up in, that I trusted, was different. My old buddies were different as well. A couple of them were draft dodgers and had skipped up into Canada. Two others guys Goody Franklyn and Shoehorn Smith were dead. Man those guys were athletes, stars on our South City Wranglers high school football team. Word was they were Green Beret on some covert mission into Cambodia. Shoehorn could’ve made it in pro football. Put a football in that boy’s hands and he could squeeze through the tightest hole.”

Shrap was putting real faces and real names to the statistics that Beau knew so well. He could feel how hard it must have been for Shrap and his family. Everything they knew and trusted had failed them. Just like the country, they found themselves adrift and confused and divided.

“And nobody supported the war anymore. They despised people like me who had volunteered to fight in it. When I went back to ‘Nam I felt alone like I’d never felt before.”

“But you still went back?”

“Yeh, sure but I dunno it kind of just gnawed at me, this feeling that we were being used by our own government and for no good reason that we could understand and it sure didn’t help that we were having our asses handed to us by the Vietcong. And instead of finding a way out of this loser war in Vietnam, those motherfuckers in Washington just kept sending more and more of us to die. We were losing the war and a whole generation of young guys like me were just so much cannon fodder. I decided to to get the fuck out.”

“When I came back to the States for an R ‘n R rotation I went home, sat my mom and dad down and told them I was out. I’d never seen my dad angrier, I can still smell his spit on my face as he screamed, “You leave before your tours up son, and you’re leaving this family. I will disown you!”

“Oh my God” Beau could feel the pain of this story. “So what happened?”

“It was kind of weird actually. In Berkley, the same Berkley I had come to hate before I went over to ‘Nam, there were people who could get you across the border. It was kind of like an underground railroad that could get us across into Canada. So I got a hold of them and a couple weeks later I was in Vancouver. Didn’t feel safe there though. Border agents were everywhere looking for draft dodgers and people like me who’d gone AWOL. If I’d been caught I’d have served hard time in Leavenworth. I needed to get north. And that’s how I ended up in Whitehorse. I tell you man, you have no idea how fuckin’ lucky you are to live in this country!”

“Any regrets?”

Shrap didn’t speak for a minute. “Haven’t spoken to my dad for ten years” he finally said, tears welling in his eyes.

“Anyway enough of that. Let’s do some drinkin’. Bartender set us up with a couple of Sourtoes.”

When Beau looked at the clock again, three hours had passed. It had been an intense conversation with Shrap but it was just what Beau needed, something to take his mind off the trial for a few hours. And besides he’d made a friend.

“You’re okay, Beau Jackson. I mean you’re still a piece of shit for defending Stokes but you’re okay. What do they call you?”

“You mean what’s my nickname?” Beau thought the question might be another lawyer joke with a predictable punch line.

“Yeh, what do they call you?”

“Bear. My friends call me Bear” he smiled.

“Well Bear Jackson, been a pleasure making your acquaintance. Where you stayin’ by the way?”

“T & M” Beau said. Shrap laughed, “You bet $50 with Tippy when you arrived?”

“Sure did. And I lost.”

“Of course you did. Most everybody does. That’s Tippy’s way of welcoming you to Whitehorse. See you around Beau the Lawyer.”

It was time for dinner and a good night’s rest. As he wandered back to the T & M Beau saw the Taku Hotel. He took a seat in the 24 hour restaurant and asked for the menu. Whatever was going to happen during the trial, Beau knew this had been a great day.  After a good meal Beau walked across the street and up to his room in the T & M. That night he slept fitfully, too geared up on the eve of the biggest case he had ever defended. 

Around four in the morning he was awoken by loud voices and a man shrieking in pain. From his window he could see right into the diner he’d eaten at earlier. There was a big commotion across the street in the restaurant. RCMP arrived, lights, sirens blaring and the screams from an injured man, something terrible had happened. It seems an old prospector, with a head full of liquor, had come into the diner and ordered a ‘beer, whisky chase and a steak, blue rare’. When his meal arrived he took one bite, spat it out on the floor and drunkenly shouted at whoever could hear him, “I ordered blue rare. This fucking thing is medium rare!”

Within moments a young man appeared from the kitchen, “You got a problem with my cooking?!”

“Yeh I got a problem, you young punk. I ordered this blue rare. Do you know what that fuckin’ means, you square head punk!” The cook had enough and turned back into the kitchen.

And then it was over. He returned with a kitchen knife and without hesitating drove it deep into the chest of the old prospector, “I’ll give you blue rare, you motherfucker!” He was dead in minutes. Whatever anger issues were buried deep inside that cook had been triggered by that old man berating him.

Beau renamed the Taku, the Attaku or the Keg and Cleaver, at the time a very popular restaurant chain in BC, hiding as he often did his lack of human empathy behind the cover of humour. He was pretty sure it fooled nobody but it worked for him. For a while.

It was as though he was a character in a John Grisham novel, the young lawyer, at once an observer, at the same time a main character. And Beau knew it at the time, each new day lived like the next page of an incredible story.

Dr. Jonathan Pringle, one of North America’s pre eminent psychiatrists was flying into Whitehorse that day. He was coming from Atlanta, Georgia where he’d given a keynote speech, Hate and Rage in the Human Mind. He was going to be a crucial witness.