136 - The Prince George Citizen - Saturday, August 14,1993
Shallow cave concealed box of human skeletons
VANCOUVER (CP) — The waves crashing through the rock archway pointed the way to the skeletons.
Chris Cooper, Greg Statter and three companions were paddling their eight-metre ocean-going canoe northwest from Kayuquot, heading for the Brooks Peninsula on the outer coast of Vancouver Island.
Cooper was on a scouting trip for his travel company Wilderness Adventures Unlimited. He found it was too wild a place to take city tourists. The big ocean swells are too daunting; the storms blow in loo suddenly and too violently.
One day in late July, along the northern shore of a small rocky island, they saw the eroded rock archway and the ocean crashing through it, first in one direction and then the other. They paddled over for a closer look and noticed the driftwood piled on the shore, and just beyond the piles, what appeared to be a shallow cave.
1 The cave was perhaps a metre high at the entrance just above the high tide line, tapering down to a third that high. It was seven or eight metres deep.
Near the back on some driftwood, Cooper recalled, was a rectangular wooden box. The lid was ajar and appeared to have been smashed, perhaps in a winter storm, y “It was not your standard coffin-sized
box, it was smaller than that. It was about four feet long and it was about three feet wide, and it had two skeletons in it.”
All kinds of thoughts flashed through their minds. The box must have floated in on an unusually high tide, Cooper thought at first. Perhaps two people had died on a passing ship and been buried at sea.
But the small size of the box was puzzling. The skeletons were too big to be children’s, and seemed to have been crammed into a too-small coffin.
The box looked time-worn and the nails were rusted. Cooper thought it must be at least 40 or 50 years old. There was no flesh or clothing left on the bones, although there were traces of hair on the back of the skulls. There were remnants of cloth and fishnet in the box.
Statter noticed there was still some connective tissue holding the bones together and guessed they were relatively fresh remains — maybe five to 10 years old. But, he added, it would take someone with forensic expertise to be sure.
It now seems likely that the skeletons are the remains of native Indians.
“In the years ago, that’s how they did it,” said Agnes Oscar, an accountant at the Kyuquot Band office. “We have one island out here, there is a cave there and people that died years ago, before we
had medical people around, they put would just put them in a box and leave them in a cave.”
There are probably many burial caves on the small islands off the Vancouver Island coast, Oscar said, though it has been half a century since anyone has been known to be buried that way.
But if the bones are more recent, as Statter suspected, the natives will want to know more about them, she added.
And so will the RCMP, said Corp. Ian George of the Tahsis detachment.
“If we can confirm thal this is a burial area, then we are not going to be disturbing it,” he said.
“But we want to make sure it’s not somebody that killed somebody and went there and hid the bones.”
Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the skeleton cave will become an indelible memory for Cooper and for his sons, Justin, 14, and Bradley, 12.
“It was almost like discovering a buried treasure sort of thing,” Cooper said. “That was the kind of sensation that we got.”
This box of skeletons found In a hidden cave off the outer coast of Vancouver Island In late July Is believed to be those of native Indians.
Confession won’t
VANCOUVER (CP) — A self-proclaimed shotgun bandit testified this week he committed the four armed robberies for which another man is serving a five-year prison term.
But although David Castagncr admitted the robberies on the record — in the presence of three judges and a Crown lawyer — his testimony cannot be used against him.
That’s because Castagner, 43, sought and received the protection of the Canada Evidence Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which means he is shielded from robbery charges based on his testimony.
He is not protected from a perjury charge if is shown to be false.
Castagner, in custody on an unrelated matter, was testifying in a B.C. Court of Appeal hearing in which Stewart McFarlane appealed his conviction on four robbery counts and one firearms offence.
Castagner said he committed the four armed robberies in the two or three days before his arrest Aug. 12, 1992.
He said he was accompanied by McFarlane and another man at the time of his arrest.
Questioned by defence lawyer Jeffrey Ray, Castagner said he used a sawed-off shotgun to rob an insurance agency, a gas station and two comer stores in Surrey.
He said he was aware at the outset McFarlane had been charged and Was to be tried, but didn’t come forward because he knew McFarlane was innocent and didn’t think he would be convicted.
He admitted he spoke several times on the telephone with McFarlane after his conviction, but said they did not discuss his possible evidence on an appeal.
Crown counsel Gil McKinnon, who maintains Castagner drove the getaway vehicle when McFarlane committed the robberies, tried to get Qastagner to relate precise details of what occurred during each heist.
* But Castagner told the court he was under the influence of cocaine and heroin at the time and was unable to recall all of the details.
• The Appeal Court has to decide if Castagner is credible before his evidence is admissible on McFarlane’s appeal.
PRIVATE CLINIC OFFERS SCANS
VANCOUVER (CP) — Beginning in January, people who can pay SI,000 for high-tech diagnostic body scans will be able to go to a private clinic set up by a former B.C. health minister.
Jim Nielsen announced this week that the Magnetic Resonance Centre of Greater Vancouver will open next year in suburban Richmond.
Customers will pay about 51,000 to have their spines, knees, brains and other body parts scanned.
Nielsen, who was Social Credit health minister from 1981 to 1986 and chairman of the B.C. Workers’ Compensation Board in 1987-88, said the clinic will mean people can get around waiting lists for the province’s five hospital-based magnetic resonance imaging units.
The units produce clear, cross-sectional pictures of the human body which are used to pinpoint the location of brain tumors, evaluate the damage done by a stroke, diagnose joint injuries and study such diseases as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis.
The units hasve no known risks or side-effects.
There are about 30 units in Canada and more than 3,000 in the United States.
Health Minister Elizabeth Cull said Nielsen’s clinic will “create the beginnings of a two-tier health care system here,” but she won’t try to block it through legislation.
She said hospital units have recently been able to increase their operating hours, so that waiting lists have come down tremendously.
Mining report ‘gloomy’
VANCOUVER (CP) — A report card on the state of B.C. mining painted a picture this week of declining employment and exploration as well as an after-tax loss of SI 19 million.
-“The profit numbers are very gloomy,” a troubled-looking David Livingstone, president of the B.C. Mining Assoc., said after the release of the 1992 Price Waterhouse report on the industry.
The accounting firm said in its assessment that “the B.C. mining industry is plagued with uncertainty . . . surrounding access to land, mineral tenure, compensation for expropriated lands."
The report also said industry
employment levels were at a 10-year low, dropping to 10,576 directly employed in 1992 from 12,587 in 1991.
Livingstone also said 1992 was the first year in the last 10 that no new mines opened in the province.
With the SI 19-million loss, the aggregate loss for the last three years totalled SI.6 billion.
Net revenues also declined for the third straight year, decreasing to S1.9 billion in 1992 from S2.2 billion in 1991.
The association seemed most troubled by a drop in exploration.
Exploration and development spending were at an all-time low and totalled only S29 million.
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