I first meet Nick Pron outside the police tribunal room at Toronto Police Headquarters. He is dressed in black and his six-foot-seven frame towers above me. He has intense green eyes and buzzed silver hair and he smiles an easy smile. We introduce ourselves and he tells me to turn off my cellphone, joking, “to… Continue reading The Thin Blue Line
Category: Summer 2005
The Wrong Arm of the Law
When Juliet O’Neill’s garbage went missing from the curb one Wednesday morning in January 2004, theOttawa Citizen reporter suspected something was up. The night before, like every Tuesday night, she had placed her garbage by the street for the next day’s pickup. When she left for work on Wednesday morning, her garbage was gone – but… Continue reading The Wrong Arm of the Law
At a Loss for Words
On a late wintry afternoon, Dave Donald zigzags through the magazine aisles at the Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. Chatelaine‘s former senior associate art director points to New York magazine. “There’s a lot of buzz around this,” he says. Then he looks for Chatelaine and Canadian Living, commenting, “Must be in family mags.” Sure enough, he twirls around and finds both… Continue reading At a Loss for Words
Back When the Scoop was King
In 1942, Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas went to Cobourg, Ontario, to cover the murders of a private detective named William Wallace Cunningham and his assistant, Agnes Fardella. The detective specialized in staging adulterous events for clients who wanted divorce papers. The pair had been shot in the middle of the night on the side of Highway… Continue reading Back When the Scoop was King
The Conscience of Nunavut
In Inuktitut, the word used for news is pivalliajut. Its literal translation is “things that are gradually developing.” For Jim Bell, editor of the weekly Nunavut newspaper, Nunatsiaq News, things always seem to be developing too gradually. This early November morning, for instance, he is fed up with the persistence of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the… Continue reading The Conscience of Nunavut