An Absent Man is Always Guilty, the Leo Rogers' Version (ePub)

Ninety-five years ago Canada was treated to very exciting times when bad guys and good guys ran through the streets of a small northern community with guns blazing. Every newspaper in the country was salivating over the deadly details and tripping over one another to be the first to provide the gory details of the chase and its deadly conclusion.

The Great War was over and sleepy little Canada was awakened with a bang and the escape of a fugitive and the death of a policeman.

Striptease is an art form performed for adult entertainment. Stripping away the facade of creditable reality of the judicial system that existed one hundred years ago has not been amusing entertainment. Has the country grown?

The concept that an absent man is always guilty became a sneering taunt to challenge the integrity of Canada's justice system and to maintain the status quo in favour of the entitled few.

Constituted authority during this part of Canadian history insisted on its entitlement to be right.

Three men died in this mess and the truth should have been told long ago, not covered over with a shroud of decency.

This shroud of decency was nothing more than an insistence that the rights of one group supplant obligation to duty and truth. An absent man is always guilty. The evidence remains to make the correction.

The front pages of Canadian newspapers for the first time in many months were crowded with pictures and stories of this event occurring on our streets. Our larger more active cousin to the south of our borders for the first time was not the only front page news.

Gun battles did take place and dangerous criminals real or invented were used to frighten small children into good behaviour.

Ernest Hemingway a foreign reporter for the Toronto Star left Toronto to report adventurous things in Europe and missed this desperate hunt for a desperado by more than half of the Ontario Provincial Police force and all of the North Bay Police Force and more than twenty hired posse members.

Almost every city and town of Ontario reported the sighting of the dangerous criminal running through their city streets.

The truth remains concealed and simply awaits discovery.