The Third Suspect

Rebecca Murdock is a lawyer with the Toronto firm Ryder Wright Blair &
Doyle.

On the morning of September 18, 1992, at Royal Oaks Mine (a.k.a. Giant
Mine) in Yellowknife, nine men crossed a picket line and climbed aboard
a man-car going into the mine. Minutes later, the man-car exploded,
ending the lives of all nine men. The Third Suspect chronicles this and
other events that brought Roger Warren to a conviction for second-degree
murder.

Staples and Owens are journalists who reported the story for The
Edmonton Journal, and won the 1992 National Newspaper Award in Spot News
Reporting for their coverage. This account assumes a good measure of
artistic licence as the authors recount, in a highly dramatic form, the
events leading up to the strike, the fatal explosion, and Warren’s
confession, recant, trial, and conviction. In painstaking detail, they
fill in the psychological backdrop of the key players in the strike and
in the ensuing police investigation, speculating on and summarizing each
character’s perception of events. (Even Warren’s pretrial confession
is recounted in detail—although it was not taped, and neither author
attended the interview in person.)

For those outside the actual Royal Oaks tragedy, this tale of intrigue
reveals the darkest aspects of failed management–labor negotiations,
as well as many political truths: Royal Oaks’s use of replacement
workers during the 1992 strike was unprecedented in the Canadian mining
industry and contributed to the abrupt deterioration of settlement
talks; the union failed to maintain a unified front and to deal with its
violent faction; and anti-scab legislation might have a role to play in
such situations. Ultimately, the authors conclude, “the line crossers
and replacement workers were little more than pawns in the bigger game
of getting Giant Mine to produce gold at a profit.” On the
accountability of Warren, the authors also summarize, “[i]n the strict
terms of the criminal law there was no collective responsibility for the
mass murder. But if there had been no Roger Warren, someone else would
have stood in his place at the prisoner’s docket. The dispute at Giant
Mine was headed for a homicide one way or another.”

If not the most readable prose, The Third Suspect is nonetheless a
suspenseful and compelling re-enactment of one of Canada’s greatest
strike tragedies.