Janet Kennedy Smith was a young Scottish woman who had been working as a nursemaid for the Baker family since January of 1923. Frederick and Doreen Baker, wealthy owners of an import-export business, were apparently happy with Janet’s care of their newborn daughter Rosemary, for they asked the nursemaid to accompany them when they moved to Paris that spring, and Janet was still in their employ when they returned to their home base of Vancouver in October of 1923.
In May of 1924, the Bakers moved in with Frederick’s brother Richard, who maintained a fashionable house in the expensive and exclusive neighborhood of Shaughnessy Heights. Richard Baker employed a Chinese servant named Wong Foon Sing, and evidently, Sing quickly developed a crush on the twenty-two-year-old Janet Smith. He would often buy her presents, some of them quite intimate, and although Janet wrote in her diary that she enjoyed attracting attention from men, she did not appear to take Sing’s infatuation too seriously.
Whether this apparently one-sided relationship had anything to do with Janet’s ultimate fate is still very much an open question, though the evidence might lead in a different direction entirely, and suggest some intensely unsavory dealings between the family, local police, and various political interests.
On the 26th of July, Wong Foon Sing reportedly heard something that sounded like a car backfiring very nearby. Upon investigation, he discovered the body of Janet Smith in the basement. There was a single bullet wound in her forehead, and a .45 revolver in her hand.
Police Constable James Green was the first to arrive, and he apparently wasted no time in tampering with the scene, picking up the gun and thereby contaminating any fingerprint evidence that might have been present. He also almost immediately came to the conclusion that Janet had taken her own life, even though there was no bullet casing found near the corpse, and no blood spatter on the basement walls, which might have suggested that she had been killed elsewhere and dragged down to the cellar. Also ignored was the fact that Janet had strange burn marks on her right side, and that the back of her head looked as though it had been smashed in with a blunt instrument.
In fact, the entire investigation, such as it was, reeked of a cover-up. Janet’s body was never even examined for sexual assault, and under orders from the police and the coroner, she was embalmed without a post-mortem, and then quickly interred at Mountain View Cemetery.
Janet’s friends, however, were outraged, and contacted the United Council of Scottish Societies to get some help in re-opening the case. This tactic was ultimately successful, for Janet’s body was exhumed in late August, and a second inquest determined that the young woman had likely been murdered. A special prosecutor was assigned to the case.
But here was where the grisly death of Janet Smith became a political flash point that led to some rather abhorrent ends. Since Chinese servant Wong Foon Sing had discovered the body and was known to have feelings for Janet, he was identified as the most likely suspect in her killing, despite his denials and a lack of physical evidence against him.
Though the allegations against Sing were paper-thin, that didn’t stop Victor Odlum, publisher of the Vancouver Star tabloid, from essentially proclaiming his guilt in the pages of the paper. Three years previously, Odlum had run for federal office on an anti-Asian platform, and he didn’t hesitate to use the Janet Smith case to bolster his racist views with the public.
In fact, in November of that year, his articles would directly lead to a bill named after Janet coming before the Legislative Assembly. Had it passed, it would have become illegal to employ Asian men and white women as servants in the same household, but as the bill was found to violate a 1911 treaty prohibiting discrimination against the Japanese, it failed to become law.
The Janet Smith murder case went nowhere for the next several months, until a shocking development in March of 1925 brought the entire affair into the public eye once again. Sole suspect Wong Foon Sing was abducted by a mob of men dressed in Ku Klux Klan garb, who took him to an undisclosed location and attempted to torture a confession out of him. Despite remaining in captivity for six weeks, Sing refused to buckle to the brutality, and on May 1st, he was let go.
Outrageously, it was later discovered that the mob of torturers had included not only three local Scottish society officials, but also two police commissioners, the chief of police, and a detective sergeant. The Attorney General, Alexander Manson, was also implicated, as he had known about the kidnapping and knew where Sing was being held, though he evidently did not participate in the crime directly. The ensuing scandal, however, would see his reputation take a drastic hit.
Three of the kidnappers were ultimately convicted, but their sentences were essentially slaps on the wrist, and the police commissioners were completely exonerated. Local government officials, suspiciously, prohibited the arrest of the other policemen involved in the crime.
Although Wong Foon Sing had not confessed to Janet Smith’s murder, even after six weeks of grueling torture, he was arrested anyway and put on trial in October of 1925. During the trial, it became quite clear that there was no significant evidence at all tying him to the killing, and the case was dismissed. He eventually went back to work for the Baker family for a time before returning to Hong Kong in 1926.
Over the years, several theories about who killed Janet Smith have made the rounds, with most of them placing the blame on a person or persons with enough money and clout to bribe the authorities into pinning the crime on a “lowly” Chinese houseboy. Some researchers have even suggested that Janet’s employer Frederick was a drug smuggler who murdered the young woman for some nefarious reason.
A far more popular hypothesis, though, posits that Janet was raped at a party by a young man named Jack Nicol, whose father was the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia at the time. Though it’s possible that Janet was killed accidentally during the course of the sexual assault, proponents of this theory allege that the killing was subsequently covered up by members of Vancouver’s political elite. Because of the deliberately botched investigation and the suspicious involvement of several prominent officials, this would seem to be a fairly likely proposition, though sadly, the killer or killers of Janet Smith were never made to pay for their terrible crime.
Crime Immemorial 