see that something was not as it should be. The guard yelled for assistance and ran to get one key to access the room and another to open the large padlock on the cage door. Another constable was in the office at the time and he attended at the cell with the guard. They found the prisoner hanging from the lattice top of the cage. He had removed his trousers and run a leg over one of the steel straps of the cage roof so that one leg of the pants hung down on each side of the strap. He then sat on the top bunk and pressed the back of his neck tightly under the point where the pant legs hung down and tied a very solid square knot under his chin. He slid his buttocks off the edge of the bunk and hung by his throat.
The guard and the constable struggled to take the prisoner down, but they were unable to raise his limp body enough to untie the tight knot in the pant legs. The constable ran to another part of the office and got a knife; however, he could not work with the knife inside the cage because he could not cut the trousers without also cutting the hanging body. There was about a ten-inch space between the top of the cage and the ceiling of the room. The constable managed to squeeze himself into that space and he began to hack at the cloth of the trousers. Finally the body was lowered to the floor and taken out of the cage. An ambulance had been called for by a radio message to a car patrolling in the town. The ambulance arrived about the time the body was cut down, but there were no indications of pulse or breathing in the body and none was restored by attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The coroner’s inquest ruled that the death was suicide and attached no blame to anyone other than the deceased.
If this event were played out today, the final storyline would probably be: Scheideman has recently obtained employment at the local mill where the reluctant employer has agreed to hire him for a probationary period of six months. He has agreed to undergo counselling and other therapy until he is thought to be able to control his aggressive behaviour. The community is still reeling and has plunged into a campaign to eliminate all firearms, particularly those formerly used by the police.
When this incident happened in 1974, the community of Golden was very appreciative of what we had done. The local newspaper ran the story with a headline very much in support of the armed pursuit and eventual removal of the dangerous driver from the public road. My daughter, who was in grade three, was assisted by one of her teachers in making a small wooden trophy with a sports car at the top. The words “Sharp Shot Scheideman” were printed on the side of the trophy and “To Dad, Love Sherry” on the base.
I still have that trophy.
The Mysterious Charred Man of Rogers Pass
The Rogers Pass section of the Trans-Canada Highway cuts through some of the most rugged mountain terrain in Canada. A large part of the highway route lies in Glacier and Revelstoke National Parks and has not been impacted by logging. Much of the eastern slope of the Selkirk Mountains along the highway is outside the park system. Every creek valley outside the park has a logging road into the upper reaches and the scars of modern clearcut logging are very evident. It was on one of these logging roads that this story begins.
Two young men were driving along the highway toward Golden from Revelstoke in the very early hours of the morning. They had just crossed the boundary out of Glacier Park and were talking about switching drivers when they saw the headlights of a car facing them. They were still some distance away when they realized that it was not moving. They could see that there was something or someone moving around on the highway in front of the parked car. They slowed and moved to the right, thinking the car may have hit an animal and that the animal might get into their path as well. They watched closely to determine what was happening, unable to see clearly because of the glare from the light beams of the stationary car.
As they came almost alongside the car and were partly out of the direct beam of the headlights, they saw that what they had thought was an animal was in fact a man on his hands and knees a few feet from the front of the car. They stopped to find out what was happening and to offer assistance. Nothing could have prepared them for what they met on the dark road that night. The lights from the car revealed a person who would have been unrecognizable even to his best friend. The person was black from head to toe, burned so badly that his ears and nose were gone. His eyelids and mouth would no longer move, and all his clothing was burned away except for the partial remains of a pair of jockey shorts and his ankle high boots. He was wringing his hands, begging for help, and pleading for a drink of water. As he wrung his hands, the skin peeled away up to his wrists and complete tubes of skin pulled off his fingers.
The two young men found a bottle of pop in their car and gave it to the man, but he was unable to get the bottle to his mouth. One of the helpers held the bottle and tried to get some of the liquid into the unmoving mouth. The man was over six feet tall and he had gotten to his feet when the helpers approached, which made the providing of a drink almost impossible. They helped the burned man into the back seat of their car, moved the other car to the shoulder of the highway, and sped toward Golden. Enroute, the burned man began to wail and scream whenever he was not begging for water. The smell of burned flesh filled the car and before long both of the helpers had vomited until they could bring up nothing more. The twenty miles to Golden were, and will always remain, the longest piece of road those two had ever travelled.
At last the lights of the community could be seen ahead. It was two thirty in the morning when they pulled into the first service station that was open. There happened to be a small café attached to the gasoline station and both sides of the business remained open twenty-four hours a day.
Golden is situated at the confluence of the Kicking Horse River and the Columbia River. There are no all-night services for almost one hundred miles to the east and ninety miles to the west. Everyone who travels that route at night will stop in Golden for fuel and food, resulting in the all-night places being continually busy.
There were twenty-five or thirty people sitting around having snacks or coffee when the burned man lurched into the bright lights of the café and asked for water. He was followed by the young men who had found him on the highway, who had now partially recovered from the initial shock of what they had found. They got the burned man onto a chair and began to pour glass after glass of water into the charred hole that had been his mouth. Someone called for an ambulance and the police. The café emptied.
One of the young constables from Golden arrived and was told the story by the two helpers. He was able to converse with the burned man in a very limited way; however, it was obvious that the man did not wish to tell him how he had been burned. The man said he had been camping alone in the mountains when it happened. An ambulance soon arrived and took him to the hospital in Golden.
One of the few doctors in the small community happened to be at the hospital when the ambulance arrived. No one, including the doctor, had ever seen a living person that badly burned. The doctor was amazed that the man had not lost consciousness. The doctor determined that there was little that could be done for him. He tried, without success, to find a vein to inject pain medication, and he attempted to give pain killers by mouth and by intra-muscular injection but these things appeared to have little if any effect.
The man had totally lost control by the time he arrived at the hospital. He would not respond to questions or requests and he frantically thrashed about, moaning and screaming and trying to get up from the emergency-room bed. Restraint straps were placed over his pelvic area and legs. His continual movement made the spectacle that much more gruesome.
The doctor told the constable that the man would soon drown and that there was no way to delay or prevent it. He said that the lungs are very dependent on the skin, and that in severe burn cases involving large portions of the skin, the most common complication is a rapid fluid build-up in the lungs. The fluid build-up increases in proportion to the amount of skin that has been burned, and drowning is the actual cause of death in most severe burn cases.
The man died about four long hours after
