B.C.’s Unsolved Mysteries forever, rain

tiffiant

B.C.’s Unsolved Mysteries: Do answers for Vanderhoof floatplane explosion lie in 10 boxes of evidence?
John Kluber and Ross Devauld died in blast 28 years ago



VANDERHOOF — This is how it began, the day their lives were changed forever and a murder mystery that continues to haunt this northern B.C. town was born.

It’s 5 a.m. on July 3, 1983. Sunday. The community of Vanderhoof, population 3,500, is asleep. Following a day of rain, it looks like the morning will be clear and sunny. A perfect day for flying. In a house along Sackner Road, Brenda Box rises in the soft light to tend to a sick child.

She’s the first to see it out there on the Nechako River, a vision of red in the trees. She wakes her husband, Dean, and tells him there’s a floatplane out on the river where there shouldn’t be one.

That’s impossible, he says. They either go up or they go down. They don’t just sit there.

Husband and wife go back to sleep.

But three and a half hours later, the deHavilland Beaver is still just sitting there. It belongs to John Kluber, owner of Vanderhoof Flying Services — a complex man with a reputation of being difficult to get along with.

Dean Box picks up the phone and dials. He tells Kluber he thinks one of his planes is sitting in the water out in front of his house.

He doesn’t tell him there’s a bomb inside the plane, on the floor near the pilot’s pedals, rigged to a timer. He doesn’t know this, of course.

Thirty minutes later, Kluber, 57, is approaching the plane in a boat borrowed from one of Box’s neighbours, Dan Boyd. Kluber’s good friend, Ross Devauld, also a pilot, is with him.

It’s about 9:30 a.m. Soon, people will be heading to church for prayer.

Suddenly, there’s an ungodly noise. An explosion. It’s violent and deep and it rips through the valley with a cracking sound, sending a black plume of smoke spiralling into the blue sky.

The plane’s doors and pilot’s seat are blown clear off the wreckage. Kluber dies instantly. Devauld, 50, hangs on for a while before his life drifts off down the Nechako. Both men leave behind children and wives.

By the end of the day, investigators know that the plane had been cut from its moorings sometime overnight. It had floated downstream for about half a mile before running aground on a sandbar just off Box’s property.

As the days drag into weeks, however, investigators learn little more as their search for answers leads only to more questions. Arrests are made, but nothing can be pinned on the suspects.

tiffiant

Based on what police know today, it remains unclear if the person or persons responsible for putting the bomb in the plane intended to kill or simply send a message.

Regardless, police say the deaths of Kluber and Devauld are homicides. Thirty years later, the same two questions continue to haunt families and investigators alike: Who? Why?

For many in Vanderhoof, it’s almost as if time stopped flowing at exactly 9:33 a.m. on July 3, 1983 — the final reading on the plane’s small clock.

But one investigator thinks he now knows how to get time running again. Sgt. Randy Bosch of the RCMP’s North District Major Crime Unit has been working the case for six years.

The answers are there, he says, in the 10 boxes of evidence that have piled up over the almost three decades of police work.

While the passage of time has worked against police, it’s also worked in their favour with the advancement of technology.

“I can’t say we are close to a major breakthrough,” he says. “However, I’m extremely confident that I’m going to make this work.”

Winter 2011. It’s cold in Vanderhoof. Snow blankets the streets.

Sandy Russell is sitting at a table in a downtown restaurant, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. Between sips, she says she can still remember the music that was playing the day her dad, Ross Devauld, was blown up by a bomb. The singer’s name was Sylvia. The cassette was pink.

The memory takes her back. She was a young woman then, 22, with a husband and young child.

Her brother and three sisters were waiting for her at her mother’s house. It was hellish: the shock, the phone calls, the speculation. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Vanderhoof.

The next 20-odd years are an exercise in frustration and despair as questions go unanswered and investigators are unable to translate rumours into fact.

Suspects walk free. Interest wanes; the case slowly grows cold. Yet rumours persist in the tight-knit community.

While others grow skeptical with time and start to let go, Russell keeps her own small investigation going.

She has her own files — transcripts from the coroner’s inquest, a few newspaper clippings — and has recently been in touch with police again.

Once, three years ago, she even tried to get a local reporter to write a story in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the explosion. It didn’t work out.

Asking what it’s been like seems foolish. It’s in the lines of her face and the way her voice softens when she’s asked to talk about her dad.

“There is not a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about my father — he was a big part of our family,” she says. “It’s an open wound that needs closing.”

Over the phone, Kluber’s widow, Carol, tells a different story, no less tragic. She remembers wandering around down at the river’s edge, dazed, her life suddenly blown apart.

There are police officers, an ambulance. A friend comes and takes her home. She has to tell her two kids. It’s particularly hard for her son. He’s 13 years old, an age when boys need a father.

“He grew up angry,” she says. “It’s there all the time, wondering why and who.”

Neither woman likes to talk about the rumours that still linger in the shadows around town, 28 years later.

But Carol tells a story about a former flying student of John’s who’d lost his licence a year or so before the explosion.

Police suspect the student was a minor player in the local drug scene.

He had broken the rules of his student’s licence by flying unaccompanied out of the designated area to a neighbouring city. His flying status was rescinded. He blamed John.

It’s just a story, of course. But Carol says her son, now a grown man, has told her he knows who killed his father.

“But, he says, ‘I’m not going to start saying stuff and get my truck blown up.’”

The second part of a coroner’s inquest into the deaths of John Kluber and Ross Devauld is under way in Vanderhoof. It’s June 22, 1984, almost a full year after the explosion.

Alive, the two men couldn’t have been more different, their personalities almost polar opposites. Like oil and water.

The son of the first white woman born in the area, Devauld, an electrician by trade, was known for his kindness and warmth. Friends say he was gentle and polite, almost to a fault — the kind of man who’d lend a hand any time he was asked.

Kluber, a WWII veteran and former logger originally from Kansas, was a man cut from a different cloth: emotionally reserved, abrupt and stern. He was known as a stickler for the rules, someone who didn’t go out of his way to make friends and someone who’d let you hear it if you made a mistake.

Since starting up his flying business in 1969, he was said to have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

tiffiant

“John, I wouldn’t say was the most liked person in this community,” was how one resident put it.

Yet, as odd a pair as they may have been, they were friends, kindred spirits even, linked by a common love for flying.

The coroner’s inquest has already heard some of this. Now the five-person jury is waiting to hear from John Penner, a Vanderhoof resident police fingered as a suspect — someone who may have supplied the explosives ­— shortly after the explosion.

A year earlier, police had searched his house and seized ammunition, prohibited weapons and explosives. Penner, 39, was arrested and charged, but for possessing explosives and prohibited weapons, not murder.

He was convicted, fined and subpoenaed to attend the inquest.

But when called, silence fills the room. Penner, a one-time miner, is nowhere to be found. It’s later learned he’s in Alaska.

What follows is several hours of nuanced questioning about Penner’s knowledge of explosives. His family and friends take the brunt of it.

One witness says he was given a kenestick, a high-powered explosive not easily found in Canada, from one of Penner’s friends in the months before the fatal explosion. He was going to use it to blow up a beaver dam, but stashed it in the bushes outside of town after the explosion.

Police are never able to find the hidden explosive. Penner’s sister, Caroline Martens, offers more telling testimony.

“He said, ‘I’m not involved in the bombing of the airplane,’” she tells the inquest. “[He said] ‘I know something about it, but it’s better off if you don’t know . . . The little you know, the better.’”

Chief Coroner John Wolsey issues a warrant for Penner’s arrest. The inquest is adjourned until April 26, 1985. Penner again doesn’t show up.

The jury offers their verdict in his absence. The deaths were homicides and they recommend police continue their investigation.

In the final report, there’s mention of some burnt paper found by investigators inside a wood heater in a cabin owned by one of Penner’s friends.

The writing is still legible: it’s a set of instructions on how to arm and detonate a specific kind of explosive.

In a letter supplied to a local paper years later, Penner denied any involvement in the explosion. Enclosed in the letter was a copy of results of a polygraph test he had taken in Anchorage in 1985.

One of the questions asked by police was whether he had sold or given explosives to anyone in 1983. It was concluded he was being truthful when he answered, “No.”

Thirty years on, Penner is back in Vanderhoof, although he goes by a different name. He says “Hi” to Carol Kluber when he passes her in town.

Most locals now decline to comment on what role he may or may not have played in the explosion. It’s there in the records, they say.

Police can neither confirm nor deny whether they still regard him as a suspect in supplying explosives, as the investigation remains ongoing.

Most locals still agree that Kluber and Devauld’s deaths were accidents — the cut rope and timer all pointing to an explosion that should have taken place in the middle of the river.

A lesson, perhaps, most likely designed for Kluber, the man who rubbed people the wrong way.

The question then, is: Who in Vanderhoof felt Kluber needed to learn a lesson?

Blown from the wreckage, the body is lying on an old wharf that had washed up on the sandbank the previous spring. The head is resting against the left arm. From a distance, it looks like Ross Devauld is taking a nap.

Dan Boyd and Dean Box wade through the water toward him. The plane is still burning, black smoke filling the air. The left wing is drooping toward the water.

Boyd’s aluminum boat is partially stuck under the wreckage. The flames have heated it. They throw water on it to cool it down.

Boyd calls out Devauld’s name. The two are friends. They’d had coffee together the previous night.

There is a slight quiver when his name is called, and then no more.

They try moving the boat from under the broken wing. Boyd sees a slick of blood in the water.

“I think John’s under the boat,” he says.

Winter sunshine fills Boyd’s house on Sackner Road as his mind wanders back almost three decades. Outside, the Nechako sits frozen under a layer of snow.

tiffiant

Boyd was in the kitchen eating pancakes with his wife the morning Kluber and Devauld walked down across his property, toward the river where Boyd kept his aluminum boat.

He knew nothing of the unmoored plane.

“I’m glad they didn’t stop,” he says. “Otherwise I would have been one of the victims.”

Witnesses at the coroner’s inquest will later testify Kluber was likely facing the bomb, his left hand resting on it when it went off. And Devauld, they say, was likely standing right behind him, on the derelict wharf.

Their injuries were horrible, their clothes torn to shreds.

While Devauld was spared any major outward damage, Kluber’s injuries were harsh — his left hand blown off, his face melted beyond recognition, his body punctured by shrapnel.

Some of the metal removed from Kluber’s body, at the back of his throat, is later identified as belonging to a Westclox Alarm Clock.

A lesson learned.

While in reality time has passed, Boyd says the incident continues to leave its mark, almost as if it happened yesterday.

“I still think about it, you know, some days,” he says. “I often think about the motive. Why? Why would they have done this? Who were they after? Not Ross, I don’t think. It was probably Kluber they were targeting.”

But of course, those are just his own thoughts, he says, based on a lifetime of rumour and speculation. Likewise, Box has his own theories of what happened that day. But he keeps them to himself.

“You see these things happening and they don’t leave you,” he says. “They never, ever leave you.”

It’s snowing again in Prince George. In a few days it will hit -18 degrees C, the coldest day of 2011.

Inside a room at the RCMP’s North District Major Crime offices on 5th Avenue, Sgt. Randy Bosch sits at a table with three booklets of file material in front of him.

In one of the booklets there is a row of grainy mug shots of the suspects arrested in 1984. They were interviewed at the time, but their statements and the accumulated evidence were not strong enough to substantiate charges.

“Cold case files are very complex,” explains Bosch. “They are very hard to get convictions on due to time. Over the years, witnesses pass away, that type of thing. So they are very difficult to prove in the end.”

But science and technology have caught up, he adds, meaning there are more tools investigators can now use that weren’t available in 1983. He’s hopeful some of these new tools will produce something.

However, more than science, he says, is the need for that one piece of the puzzle, that one spring, that one gear that can get the clock of time running again.

“We need the public to come forward — anybody that has good solid knowledge of the incident and the suspects involved,” he says. “What we need right now is a good solid fact.”

On the record, Bosch can say this: investigators are aware of Carol Kluber’s story about the flying student as well as the whereabouts of those fingered as suspects 30 years ago.

His message to those behind the deaths of John Kluber and Ross Devauld is simple.

“It’s been a long time,” he says. “Let the families rest and let’s put it to an end.”

Ayone with information, or anyone who wants to offer a tip, can contact one of the following numbers: North District Major Crime Prince George at 250-649-3903; Vanderhoof RCMP at 250-567-2222 or Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

tiffiant

John Kluber and Ross Devauld died in float plane explosion 28 years ago. Nobody knows who's responsible, or why they did it. Do the answers lie in 10 boxes of evidence that have been gathered since?