Shell Lake Massacre

Tony Barclay is a retired juvenile corrections probation officer and a
former public-health research associate at the University of Toronto.

This book describes the 1967 murder of nine members of a farming family
in Saskatchewan, and the events that followed it. The author, a
journalist who covered the story at the time, has given us a complete
picture of what happened. He describes the investigation and trial of
the confessed murderer, and adds an account of what happened to the
various participants. The book is illustrated with pictures of the scene
of the crime, the victims, the survivor, and the murderer as they are
today.

The book is exhausting in its detail, with long transcripts of key
interviews and much incidental trivia associated with the case. Perhaps
Tadman is trying to help us understand what went on in the mind of the
killer—a man who deliberately and without any feeling killed all but
one member of a family, including a small baby. In the last chapter, the
author describes his recent interviews with the murderer in hospital; he
includes samples of writing to shed light on the working of a mind
locked in the world of schizophrenia. This is also a story of the
bureaucratic incompetence that allowed the murderer to return to his
parents’ house from a mental hospital after only a two-month stay. He
had been diagnosed as a highly dangerous person, not in any way cured,
under control, or even stabilized on drugs.

Much of the book is repetitive, and I would question the need to
include some of the material; perhaps it falls between the cracks, being
neither cheaply sensational nor compellingly clinical. Nevertheless, one
puts down the book with a far greater understanding both of the kind of
person who would commit such a crime and of the world he lived in.