Chronicle of nine deaths foretold

A Montreal journalist digs deep into a labour dispute that quickly turned to murder

by PHILIP PREVILLE

After completing his master's degree in journalism from Ottawa's Carleton University in 1991, Francis Thompson found himself banished to reporter's Siberia. His job hunt led him to Yellowknife, located about as far as you can get from big cities, big politics and, one imagines, the big story. He never would have imagined that Yellowknife, of all places, would be the setting for Canada's most acrimonious labour strike in the last 40 years--a dispute that would ultimately lead to nine deaths, a botched RCMP investigation and quite possibly the conviction of an innocent man.

On September 18, 1992 a bomb blast deep down in the tunnels of Yellowknife's Giant gold mine killed nine replacement workers. The blast was the final escalation of an extremely bitter four-month-old dispute between Giant's owner, Royal Oak Mines Inc., and the union representing Giant's 250 miners. But it was also an event that could easily have been avoided. Thompson, who now lives in Montreal, recently co-authored (with fellow Yellowknife journalist Lee Selleck) Dying for Gold: The True Story of the Giant Mine Murders, published by HarperCollins.

Once the blast occurred, the national media descended upon Yellowknife in hordes--with no idea of what they were really covering. "The national media portrayed it as a 'true crime' story--against a background of hostility that was difficult to explain, there was a psychotic individual who went on a killing rampage. It was like a cop story on TV, where the police come in and make everything right."

For the people who lived in Yellowknife, though, nothing could have been farther from the truth--and there was no mystery whatsoever to the hostility. "We [reporters in Yellowknife] had watched the situation unfold from the start," Thompson says, "and it had been predictable for a long time. No one predicted a bomb, but it was clear that the dispute was going to lead to violence.

Police began returning more and more frequently to one striker, Roger Warren. Warren had originally told them he saw two men leaving the site of the mine in the hours prior to the blast. The RCMP brought in an outside investigator to give Warren the shakedown; under pressure, he confessed to planting the explosives himself.

But as time wore on, Warren's confession was thrown into doubt; among other things, it simply didn't jibe with most of the other evidence presented at the trial. According to Dying for Gold, "the police were not interested in inconsistencies and didn't ask many questions about them. They had someone willing to take the rap and that's all they wanted." Many believe Warren sacrificed himself for the greater good in order to put an end to the dispute; it's a theory Thompson isn't willing to discard.

So who set the bomb, then? Thompson has his own suspicions, but says you'll have to piece it together from the book. For Thompson, the main issue at this point is not who did it, but how it ever happened in the first place. "If this dispute had occurred in Toronto," he insists, "it would have been over in a month."