This is not your usual true-crime story. It’s an elegant, emotional, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad story of a man’s fall from grace, written from the point of view of a daughter who once adored him. And it’s a story of how his actions shattered a family who once placed their trust in him.
Gerry Priest perpetrated, and almost got away with, the audacious theft of a large amount of silver ore from a Yukon mine in the early 1960s. Priest was the chief assayer for United Keno Hill Mine (UKHM) at Elsa, about seven hundred kilometres north of Whitehorse. The mine was then the second-largest producer of silver in Canada. Priest saw an opportunity to take some high-grade chunks of silver ore that had been left lying on the mine floor and claim them for his own. Working with at least one accomplice in the dark hours, he removed, bag by bag, seventy tonnes of ore and sent the material to a smelter in the United States. To cover up the theft, he staked his own claim at a nearby site known as the Moon and claimed the ore came from there.
Priest’s family believed him — for a time. To his young daughters, Alicia and Vona, he was larger than life, a hero. He dangled before them the prospect of a better life that included horses and trips to Disneyland. To his wife, Helen, a stunningly beautiful and resourceful woman who had suffered greatly as a refugee in Second World War Europe, he promised comfort and security.
Things began to unravel after UKHM became suspicious of truckloads of ore leaving the area. Priest and his accomplice were eventually charged and ordered to stand trial after the longest preliminary hearing in Yukon history. It wasn’t easy for the prosecution to establish where the ore had come from. The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial ended with a conviction, although, as the author points out, Priest would not likely have been found guilty today, since he was charged under a now-overturned section of the Criminal Code that placed the burden of proving innocence on the accused.
The facts of the case — how Priest carried out the theft and covered his tracks, how the company spared no expense to disprove his case, how RCMP officers never relaxed their vigilance, how people living in the company town hated UKHM and applauded anyone who stuck it to the company — make a good story in themselves.
But the real story is intensely personal. Alicia Priest, a journalist, pens a heartbreaking yet objective account of growing up in the care of her complicated father: “Whether or not he knows, is prepared or cares a whit, a father holds his daughters’ hearts in his hands. Dad, like many men, had steady, strong and tender hands when we were young, but as Vona stampeded and I tiptoed to womanhood, his hands trembled, became rough and, at times — there is no other word for it — cruel.”
Under the pressure of “Dad’s” increasingly dark and erratic behaviour before, during, and after serving his sentence, the marriage broke up and the family scattered. But, as the writer makes clear from the beginning of the book, the true heroes of this story are her mother, Helen Friesen, and grandmother, Maria. Theirs is a tale of loss and survival as German-speaking Mennonites forced to flee Russia and then Nazi Germany. In Vancouver, Helen falls for the seemingly strong and charming Gerry Priest. After they marry, her mother — “Omi” to her grandchildren — joins the family in the Yukon. “Omi was our rock,” declares the writer.
Included in the book are professional-quality photographs of their early life — taken by Gerry Priest, a talented amateur photographer. They are a great accompaniment to the story.
This beautifully written book is Alicia Priest’s first. Sadly, it is also her last. Priest began the book in 2011 after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — an incurable neurodegenerative disease that leads to gradual paralysis and death. With the end of her life approaching, she decided it was time to tell her family’s remarkable story. Priest died January 13, 2015.
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.