Warning: This story contains descriptions of physical and psychological violence, and self-harm.
Some memories are hard to talk about, much less to write down into a story for others to read. The events here are real, and have only ever been told to a couple of close friends or to the police. I thank my sister Kim for her bravery and willingness to let me render them here.
In her words, “I’m happy to share my stories if it helps someone else who’s gone through something similar. I want them to know that they can survive their terrible times, and can think of themself as a survivor – not just a victim”. Thank you Kim.
There was this real psycho who lived next door to Park Place from 1975 or so, up until about 1986. I’m just going to call him “The Tailor” because I really don’t want to memorialize him in any way or have his real name captured in Google for others to find.
I’m not just throwing around the label “psycho” for dramatic effect. “The Tailor” was a seriously disturbed and deluded person with his own troubled childhood, and a destructive tendency to dominate and manipulate those who were smaller and weaker than him. He threatened and beat his partners, he lied, gaslighted, and tried to brainwash them against their families, and he maintained physical control by locking them in his house so that they couldn’t escape. All of these things happened to my little sister.
If you asked anyone who knew about him back in our ‘hood, the words “fucking crazy” would probably be used. Police would use other words, like “violent offender”. One cop who knew him even described him as having “Clifford Robert Olsen tendencies”. In 1980s Vancouver, you knew what that meant.
I think my sister was his longest-suffering and most severely hurt victim. Since the age of 13, Kim had an on-off involvement with him after he invited her into his house to see his doberman pinscher pups. He would have been about 24 at the time, so his interests were in grooming young girls as well as dogs.
As life with our Dad became less tolerable for my sister Kim, she spent more and more time at The Tailor’s house. Being inside his house and living with him and his old step-father might have felt like she’d found a new family to belong to when her own home life was falling to pieces, but his house was not a safe place for her. The Tailor was a dominator and a manipulator at heart. His nature seemed to be that he was the centre of his own world, and had to control it and everyone in it.
Kim was with him in one way or another for about four years. Looking back on it, I suppose for her it was like going from the frying pan into the fire. When one is alone and tired of fighting to get to shore with no support on the horizon, maybe a shark looks the same as a life raft.
Kim never had that much support or safety at home with our father. At the time, I didn’t know what had happened between them, just that they fought a lot of the time. As she got older and stronger, she railed against our father’s authority and, in ways I couldn’t appreciate, she saw right through our old man: she couldn’t respect him and seemed to have truly developed a hatred for him.
By the age of fifteen, she’d tried to run away from home a couple of times, and at one point was sent by Dad to live with a relative, and later, with one of her childhood friends. But once The Tailor had set his sights on her, he remained obsessed with her, and no matter where she went or was sent to, he found her phone number or her address and would harass her hosts until she finally left with him. The pattern would just keep repeating itself.
By 1984, after surviving a heart attack and multiple strokes, our Dad was 63 and just a shadow of his previous self. He walked slowly with aid of a cane, essentially retired for good. His sole income was now a disability pension, and it was not enough to support a three bedroom townhouse, especially with only two people living in it most of the time. So Dad decided to move us into a smaller apartment to downsize and reduce costs.
Kim told Dad flat-out that she wasn’t coming to live with us. The Tailor had convinced her that her family didn’t want her or love her anymore, and that they were actually abandoning her by moving away. She turned her lack of control and the rejection that she’d felt at home around on Dad: refusing him was like asserting independence. He’d failed her as a parent, and she took the only avenue she could see available to her at the time. She was just about 16 years old when she made that decision.
Black and Blue
Months after Dad and I had moved downtown into a little one bedroom apartment on Hornby Street, The Tailor beat Kim savagely. Kim told me later that he’d been drinking a lot and he was prone to what she called “blackouts”, where he’d be conscious but detached from reality in the moment, and have no memory of his actions afterwards.
He was extremely violent with her. He punched her in the face numerous times and smashed her face into a mirror on the bedroom wall. She ran to the bathroom to check her face and saw that her eyes had started to swell up. When she turned around, the butt of his rifle stock was just inches from her head. He warned her that if he wanted, he could cave in her skull. She was close enough to read the inscription on the rifle stock that said “Merry Christmas, from Dad”. It was a Christmas gift that Tailor had gotten from his own father. She closed her eyes waiting for the hit, but then felt the cold steel of the barrel push up against her temple. He’d turned the gun around and now had his finger on the trigger. She figured this was how she was going to die. After a few miserable moments like this, she opened her eyes again and drew a fresh breath. The gun and its owner had disappeared. She crept over to the bedroom and saw that he had passed out, face-down on the bed.
With her heart pounding and eyes streaming, Kim saw her chance. She grabbed her purse and jacket and made a desperate sprint out of the house. She ran up to the corner gas station and told the attendants her story. They saw her cuts and bruises and black eyes and called the police right away. She told the cops that her boyfriend had beaten her and threatened her with his rifle. When they arrived, they took her in a squad car to the precinct office and let her listen on the police radio. He was well known to the Vancouver Police. She heard as the calls went out and cars were dispatched to Tailor’s house. Seven cop cars arrived, and he was arrested. He ended up getting probation.
Afterwards, dropped off back in her neighbourhood with nowhere to stay and still adrenalized and in pain, Kim limped over to a friend’s house nearby, where the family cried over her injuries and took her in for the night.
The next day she appeared at our apartment downtown, and I was shocked at what I saw when I opened the door: her lip was swollen, her face was covered in purple and blue bruises, and she had a dark black eye that was partly closed.
I waved her inside quickly. “Oh my God! What the hell happened to you?”
She looked sheepish and physically exhausted. It was absolutely heartbreaking. She dropped her purse and slumped into the couch, telling me she hadn’t slept in over 24 hours. Our Dad was due home from the hospital the following day, having just recovered from his most recent stroke. He’d have no idea about Kim’s predicament, and neither of us wanted him to see her all beat up like that. I didn’t know if they’d really want to face each other either anyway.
All the same, I should not have cared about my Dad’s reaction. I felt like the biggest, most spineless weasel telling my poor beat-up sister that she couldn’t stay with us for long. She’d have been infinitely safer staying with us, even temporarily, since our location was unknown to her attacker. That bastard always came looking for her whenever she ran away.
While she sat gingerly on the couch stretching out her many aches, she recounted the whole story of her assault and escape, and I just kept looking at her in shock. As we talked more, in her voice I heard regret of the past, thin bravado for the moment, and real fear about what her future might bring.
Kim lit a smoke and sipped from a fresh cup of tea, and I told her I’d buy some food and be back in a few minutes. I trotted across the street to the corner grocery to buy some milk and a can of chicken noodle soup. When I got back about ten minutes later, she was sound asleep on the couch. She looked so small and I could only feel bewildered about her situation. As I covered her with a blanket and heated up the soup, I tried to console myself that at least she was safe for a little while, but neither of us had any idea where she could go from here.
She ended up going back to you-know-who.
Halloween Nazi
On Halloween of 1985, after I’d moved back into Park Place again, Kim was visiting at the townhome I was renting. The Tailor showed up at my house dressed in full goose-stepping Nazi military uniform, accompanied by his two doberman pinschers. He’d coloured his hair silver and was referring to himself as “Rommel” or someone. The Tailor was blonde and blue-eyed, and had some kind of romanticized hero worship and stomach-turning fascination with Nazis and other nightmarish male power figures. It was gross.
All animals are inherently innocent in my opinion, but his two dogs were with him on their short chains, trained to protect their master. They scared the crap out of me. They were his protection, so no one would approach him.
I think he’d come over because he wanted to show off his Halloween costume. As far as I knew, the guy had no friends. Oh, lucky us. I was nervous around that fucker, but I couldn’t turn my sister away. No matter where she went, he would eventually find her.
At some point, The Tailor and Kim disappeared upstairs. Me and my few guests just hung out downstairs in the living-room, waiting for him to leave. Eventually he did, with Kim in tow. She told me later that he would only have left if she’d left with him. It was such a recurring trap for her.
When I went upstairs later, I found a big swastika painted on my bedroom wall in silver spray paint. Cursing, I spent 20 minutes trying to scrub it off. It only got fainter but was still obviously a damned swastika. I pinned some posters up over top of it and prayed that my kind landlord, a Christian reverend, wouldn’t see it until after I moved out someday. With shit like this going on, my moving day might end up being sooner rather than later.
The Extortion Attempt
Since my sister had my phone number, so did The Tailor, and one night he phoned me and said that I had to come over to his house. He told me that there was a situation involving my sister and my family and if I knew what was good for me and my sister, I’d better come to his house that night. I dreaded the idea of going over to him but was worried what he might do to Kim. Maybe I was curious about her living situation too.
His house was located at the eastern edge of our townhouse complex, adjacent to a small wooded area that we called “The Bush”. One of a few houses sitting on land owned by BC Hydro, his was a small white stucco cottage, likely built in the forties. It was dingy and had a high chain link fence surrounding the backyard to keep his dogs locked in, but I learned later that it also was locked to prevent my sister from getting out.
The house had a dark, depressed, and forlorn feeling. From the outside it looked like there were no lights on. I knocked on the door and heard his voice call out “It’s open Ernie”. I always went by my second name, but he used my first name as if we were familiar, and probably because he knew it got under my skin.
As I entered, I saw that the walls inside the front hall were covered with coloured marker drawings of monsters and swastikas, like the notebook scribbles of some demented child. A stuffy stink of negativity seemed to hang in the air. I tasted copper in my dry mouth as I wandered in towards the living-room.
His front room was dark except for one red light. He sat in a tall black office chair in the middle of the room, as if it were his little throne. I’m quite sure that’s how he saw himself, and how he wanted others to see him too.
He told me that he knew our mother had money in her bank account from her inheritance, and he wanted me to get him three thousand dollars from her and bring it to him by a certain date.
I told him he was nuts.
“Don’t fuck with me Ernie”, he replied. “I can have myself declared insane, and once I’m in Riverview, your mother’s as good as dead. You know I can do it. So, what do you want it to be?” It sounded like bullshit, but I was convinced that he believed it.
Curled up on a little couch against the wall was my sister Kim, looking dejected and resigned. It was surprising to see her right there, witnessing it all but saying and doing nothing. I don’t know where her mind was, but she couldn’t look at me. Whatever this bastard had learned about our family would have been volunteered willingly when she felt he was listening sympathetically, when he was pretending to support her as she told him the sad story of our mother’s fall. It upset me that he knew anything about us. Kim had trusted him, and now he was using our family information to try to twist some gap in-between her and her brother. On the surface, it was a crazy extortion threat, but more than that, it was really a power play. He was trying to intimidate me and demonstrate to Kim the power that he could flex over someone close to her. He was also trying to fuck with my mind in the same way he’d fucked with hers for years.
This was the first time I really understood how deeply my sister was trapped under this man’s sick influence. He was trying to break her away from her family. As broken apart as we already were, she still had me and some real family out there, even if he wanted to weaken the few bonds that were left.
At the time, I could only sense whispers of these ideas, but I felt them emotionally. I was intimidated and worried about losing my sister forever. These days, we’d refer to her as an at-risk youth. I wondered if she’d even survive her situation with him. I was 19, and Kim was almost 17.
I figured I’d just say yes to whatever he asked and then get out of there, if I could. After standing in his living-room, listening to him threaten my family and feeling almost too scared to speak, The Tailor said I could go. I was relieved to be back outside. I wasn’t going to give that fucker a dime, but the possibility of his threat hung over me. What could or would he really do, and what would happen to Kim?
I walked down the back alley of our townhouse complex in the blessedly crisp night air, feeling a bleak, panicked outlook and a heavy heart. I couldn’t handle the idea of not being able to help Kim, or the vague threat that he’d made against my mother’s safety. Mum and Kim were both vulnerable, and I worried that maybe there was something to the bastard’s threats.
Facing the possibility of losing Kim psychologically after having symbolically lost Mum and Dad to their illnesses, I experienced for the first time a bleak realization of the complete dissolution of our family. At that moment, any of my usual busy-ness, hopefulness, or sense of duty had completely left me; I just felt a big, dark nothing inside, like a completely hollowed-out shell.
As I stumbled down through the Park Place complex towards home, I came to a point where the sidewalk in front of me split into a Y. It sounds like a cliche, but there it was in front of me: a simple binary choice manufactured by a muddled mind.
If I went left, I’d end up back in my lonely home. Feeling like I’d lost Kim to that madman was a straw I just couldn’t bear. First Mum had almost died and now was permanently hospitalized, then Dad went kind of the same way and was helpless in his care home, and now Kim’s future and freedom seemed in jeopardy. What little family we’d ever been had fallen apart in just a few years, and I couldn’t do anything to help anyone. I felt the loss coming on like a rift and a failure, as if I had watched the last thread of our family unravel right there in The Tailor’s dank little living-room.
I stood in the dark at my little crossroads and considered just going home. I remembered a big old ivory-handled knife that Dad and Poppy had used to carve roasts for many of our Sunday family dinners. It was sharp enough. I could just drag that thing hard across each wrist and let everything fucking go. It would be so simple. But I also knew that the act would be irreversible and I’d regret it the minute I broke the skin. I couldn’t do that. I shook my head and muttered that I was too afraid to even kill myself. My friend Mark had once quoted me some advice from his mother, who told him “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”. Maybe we just needed more time.
So, I went to the right-hand path and took a chance that my friend Doug and his family would let me talk to them. I needed help. It was around quarter to one in the morning on a weeknight and I didn’t want to wake anyone up, but I really needed to talk to someone I could trust. I hoped they wouldn’t be too pissed off at being woken up so late.
So, I knocked on the front door, and within a few minutes was in their living-room telling the story of the extortion attempt to Doug’s mother Margaret (bless her). I felt small and stupid in the retelling. It was hard to admit to my fear and helplessness and how Tailor’s threats had gotten under my skin, but as I told the whole thing out over the course of a few minutes, the entire affair seemed to become smaller and less imposing.
Margaret told me that he couldn’t do any of the things he was threatening to do. I recalled that my Mother, a resident at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, was also a Ward of the province and her money and legal affairs were all managed through the Public Trustee. I probably couldn’t have gotten to her money even if I’d wanted to. With a good-natured chuckle, Margaret scoffed that there was no way his scheme could ever work; he could never get declared crazy and admitted, and he could never get anywhere near to my mother.
Thank god that The Tailor never found out that I had Dad’s bank card and PIN number so that I could deposit his disability cheques!
I’d been upset and let my fear open up a sliver of vulnerability and introduce just enough doubt for his crazy bullshit to have an effect. I’d just needed to hear a wise, rational voice reassure me of the odds against it and remind me of how crazy it all sounded. I never acted on his threats and nothing ever came of it. It was just another little head game.
Facing Assault Charges
Later in the year, Kim was staying with me for a few nights. She seemed to get away from The Tailor from time-to-time, and it was a happy relief having her with me. It was a weekend night, and we were partying. Some good buddies from the neighbourhood were over for drinks and we were all having a fun time.
But of course The Tailor showed up at the front door, looking for Kim. (At least he didn’t have his dogs with him this time.)
He came in and stood in the front hall by the door, and told Kim to come with him. She was defiant and told him she wasn’t leaving.
I hated that the bastard was in my house, and I hadn’t forgotten about the beatings he’d laid on Kim, or the vandalism, or his little extortion attempt. Standing across the other side of the living-room near the phone, I used my outdoor voice to tell him that he wasn’t welcome, and to generally fuck off.
Someone said to call the police, and it all went sideways from there. I lifted the phone receiver, and Tailor turned red and said “Are you going to call the cops Ernie? Go ahead!” He picked up a glass from the coffee table, and splashed the drink all right in my face.
Major challenge. I was 19, afraid, and full of adrenaline, so I went for it and started dialing 911.
Before the other side could answer, Tailor had rushed across the room to grab the phone from my hand. Kim screamed and jumped on his back, trying to protect me. According to Kim, he flung her off and she went flying into the wall. Our friends were shocked into submissive motionlessness, frozen in their seats. Nobody had signed up for this kind of shit.
Meanwhile, I struggled unsuccessfully against a guy who had a good twenty or thirty pounds on me. Kim told me later that he’d wrapped the phone chord around my neck and clocked me a good one on the head with the handset. I don’t remember that.
Tailor must have played amateur hockey. He got me into the kind of hockey fight hold that I’d seen on TV: I was bent right down at the waist and he was over me with my arms locked up behind my back. I was 19 and in good shape, but he totally had me trapped: I couldn’t move and felt useless. Kim kept yelling at him, and after another thirty seconds of my ineffective struggles, he let me go. He made a few threats and ran out the front door.
I did call the Cops and when an officer arrived, I told him everything that had gone down and wrote out my full statement on a yellow form. I didn’t want to press charges right then – I just wanted the whole shitty evening to be over with and to get my quiet place back. The cop told me that I could press charges by calling them later. I took the cop’s business card and thanked them, just wanting the whole goddamned mess to be done with.
After the cops left, I found Kim upstairs in the unused master bedroom. She was sitting against the wall in the empty room, rocking back and forth with her knees tucked under her chin, talking to herself in full meltdown mode. I’d never seen her like that before. It took a little talking and rubbing her shoulder before her self-talk subsided and I felt like I was able to reach her. I reassured her that we were all okay and safe now. My heart was still pumping like a hammer; I was reassuring myself as well.
In the days after the big fight episode, The Tailor’s self-induced paranoia started to reveal itself. He began phoning me at two and three in the morning, drunk, threatening me not to press charges. He was just “Don’t press charges Ernie”, night after night, over and over in a slow, drunken slur. I hated hearing his voice, and I couldn’t even bring myself to respond. I just wanted him to stop calling. The only answer he ever got from me was a “maybe”. I knew I didn’t want to say “no” outright. The possibility of charges was the only thing I had on him. His drunken midnight phone calls went on for a few more nights and then just stopped.
I finally realized that his meltdown at the idea of assault charges was a major Achilles Heel. Kim told me later that he’d warned her that there were bikers and other bad guys in jail who’d love to get their hands on him. I don’t know if it was true or just part of some elaborate “bad ass” power fantasy that he’d built up for himself in his own head.
Once I started seeing his feet of clay, his fear of arrest, and how his inflamed paranoia and narcissism had started to work against him, I realized that I wasn’t quite as scared of him anymore. It felt for me like, even though I’d gotten a thumping for standing up to him, it had kind of worked. It felt like the beginning of the end of some of his crazy power.
Ironically, it may have come to me from a lesson from my Dad (our family’s own resident bully) that bullies need a black eye to understand when to back off. Abusers fear abuse. I’d learned what fear felt like from being afraid of my Dad, but had also learned from life that every bully is afraid of someone else, and that they usually dominate others in order to avoid facing their own weakness. The Tailor’s fear was being weaker than someone else, and of being killed in jail by those scarier than him. I didn’t even have to press charges: the threat of being arrested was in itself enough to get him to back off.
Sometime later, after he was finally gone from the neighbourhood, I was overjoyed to see The Tailor’s dingy little house get demolished. The scene of some terrible memories was reduced to a pile of rubble – finally gone from my neighbourhood.
I walked up towards the rubble and saw a perfect symbol of his tenure. As I left the scene walking homeward down our back alley with a stupid grin on my face, a fence post at the front of Tailor’s wrecked house bore his toilet seat, hanging like a stained plastic scarecrow.
Scar Tissue
Over the years, I’d occasionally do web searches for The Tailor, and I found a few police notices and a lot of provincial court records. I discovered that he had a long history of offences in criminal court, ranging from mischief and uttering threats, to breach of probation, attempted fraud, and assault. There are at least a dozen instances where the court had ordered psychiatric evaluations of him. The online records only go back as far as 2000, but there are likely many other charges predating it, including those relating to my sister.
The last thing I read about him was that in 2007, he’d been remanded to the Pretrial Correctional Centre near Victoria, and had mailed a razor blade to a judge, which had only earned him more time behind bars.
In June 2020, I discovered an obituary notice about the Tailor, matching his full name and dates. I emailed the funeral home asking if non-family could get confirmation or details about his death, and they replied basically “no”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did end up getting killed in jail after all.
Kim cried tears of relief at the news of his death. I was relieved too, but mostly happy to see that it gave her some much-needed closure. She had tried to be brave and defiant back when she was in the middle of all the chaos, she had stayed brave and defiant a decade later when communicating with police who were investigating charges brought on him by his new victims, and she remains brave and defiant to this day if she has to recount her painful memories.
The memories do still bear a burdensome weight and the scars are still there under the surface. It’s good to tell these kinds of painful stories to understand their lessons, but it’s important to use them to purge their painful entanglements, to take the power away from the perpetrator, and to finally claim your stories as your own.
