Past 10:30pm.
Sorry I didn't write on Saturday. I turned in much, much earlier than I meant to.
Saturday morning I went to the Public Archives, there to find some articles about unsolved murders and missing persons cases. I found quite a bit including a couple articles about a Halifax who went hunting in February of 1953 and has never been seen since.
I was re-reading Tim Bousquet's "Dead Wrong" series last week, at least the four parts that have run so far. It's been a year since the most recent chapter ran, and I hope that he resumes the series soon. But I digress.
In part four, Tim discusses unsolved murders of women going back to the 1970's. More than once he cites a series that ran in the Halifax Daily News back in 1991. When I realized that the Archives has 20+ years of that much-missed paper, I was a Bevboy on a mission.
After a couple of hours looking through three different microfilms I found all six parts of that series. That is a good thing. They now reside on my dropbox, which is an even better thing.
Turns out that this series from 1991 also reported some stories that I have covered in Frank. The Michael Resk and Vincent Pius Griffin murders are both discussed. I investigated them last year. In the Daily News piece, the writer, Rod Roberts, reported something that had not occurred to me when I wrote about Vincent Griffin. I wish I had.
Tim Bousquet says that to this day he considers Roberts' pieces from 1991 to be some of the best and most detailed coverage of unsolved murders in Halifax. I mostly agree with him. The first four articles are full-page affairs. The remaining two pieces are much shorter. Even the second article, about Michael Resk, uses a couple of overly-large pictures to fill a full page. I think Roberts was unable to find much information about some of those cases and had to resort to a few tricks to fill pages.
I can tell you that this is not unusual. It is very difficult to investigate these unsolved murders and do it in a way that provides new information and original research, which are two goals that my editor and I want to do each and every time. That's why I can't do one of these articles for every issue of Frank. Sorry, folks. I do my best.
Anyway, after four and a half hours of researching this stuff and finding a few odds and sods for my media column, my stomach was grumbling. I didn't realize it was after 2:30! Time just flies by when I am focused on finding this stuff. I ended up going to the Hali Deli on Agricola Street. We have been there a few times. It is not a fully authentic Jewish deli, but it is the closest to one we likely will ever have in Halifax. As I understand it, true Jewish deli's do not serve milk products, so the vanilla shake I slurped up would be a dead giveaway. I also had a smoked meat sandwich. If there is a better place to get a smoked meat sammich in Halifax, please let me know. I am standing by waiting for your response.
It is past 11pm. I really should hit the hay. Four day work weeks seem to feel like six day ones.
See you tomorrow.
Bevboy
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