Raw justice down the Yukon trail

Robert "Two-by-Four" Truswell came from Lower Hutt, but spent his last 30 years digging for gold in the hills of the Yukon in Canada's arctic. Truswell had a fearsome reputation among the gold miners along Bonanza Creek outside Dawson City. He earned his nickname by attacking another patron at Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Casino with a plank of wood.

His violent reputation caught up with him at the age of 53, when he arrived uninvited on a neighbouring miner's claim. He was 48-year-old Kieran Daunt, a dark-haired, slight man who had been Truswell's neighbour on Gold Hill for 25 years. The two men had a history of arguing. That afternoon, Truswell drove up and began hassling his neighbour with threats and accusations. Daunt was terrified, and fired three shots. Two of them found their mark, killing Truswell.

Daunt was accused of second-degree murder but did not face trial at home. Instead, he stood before a jury at the Yukon Supreme Court in Whitehorse, 500 km south of Dawson City, a long way from the goldfields with their tradition of frontier justice. The trial cast the gold-mining life in sharp relief, Robert Truswell's in particular.

As a young man, Truswell emigrated to Alberta, Canada, finding work in the booming oil fields of Fort McMurray. After a few years floating between cities, he took up goldmining near Dawson City, famous for attracting thousands of prospectors during the gold rush of the 1890s.

Truswell spent almost 30 years in the city, living on the land in a rough but well-organised cabin. His claim bordered Daunt's on a rise called Gold Hill, above Bonanza Creek, about 19km from Dawson City - one of the most remote communities in Canada. It sits halfway up the Yukon Territory, just below the Tombstone Mountains in the western Arctic. About 900 people make their home there through the 24-hour sunlight of the summer and the 24-hour darkness of winter. Many are gold miners who hope to hit the motherlode they still believe is in the mountains somewhere. Most of them cobble together a living digging money out of the earth, and doing odd jobs. Some strike it rich. A good cross-section of those miners testified at Daunt's trial. The miners painted a picture of Truswell which shored up Daunt's claim that when Truswell drove onto his property on August 28, 2003, Daunt thought that his fellow miner was there to kill him. Believing he needed to kill Truswell to save himself, he shot three times from a 7mm Mauser rifle at Truswell, who had not left his truck. Daunt couldn't tell if Truswell had a rifle or not, so he fired. Two of those shots hit Truswell as he sped past toward his own claim.

Daunt called the police to report the shooting. When they arrived, Truswell was dead, drenched in blood, sprawled across the bench seat of his truck on a road leading from Daunt's claim to his. His head leaned toward the partially open passenger side door, and he was in just his socks. His gumboots were on the floor of the driver's side of the truck.

The miners in the area didn't seemed surprised that there had been violence between the two. They knew Truswell often threatened the neighbouring miner, and would have predicted Daunt would be the victim in any altercation.

It was in Dawson City that Truswell got his nickname, Two-by-Four Bob. After an argument over a woman at Diamond Tooth Gertie's casino, Truswell left, only to return with a plank of wood concealed under a long coat. He whacked the other customer, Gary Hodges, over the head.

"He knocked him right out of his shoes," said Wayne Hawkes, who lives and mines near Gold Hill.

On that night in 1982, Hawkes held Truswell down until police arrived. Truswell earned his handle and a short prison sentence from that attack. Hodges suffered permanent damage.

Hawkes is a burly man, but he took Truswell's threats seriously. When he heard Truswell saying he would kill Daunt because he was a thief. Hawkes warned Daunt to "watch your back".

Daunt called police from a friend's house - where he hid the gun - to report the shooting. Later, he had no explanation for hiding the weapon. When police asked him to guide them to the scene of the shooting, he was reluctant because he was worried that Truswell would be waiting for him. He didn't realise he'd killed his neighbour.

Corporal Daniel Gaudet told the court that as Daunt guided them to his Gold Hill mining claim he told them, "It was either him or me."

A few days later, Daunt revealed he had hidden the gun in the roof of a shed at the property from where he called police.

Before the trial, there was much popular support for Daunt. A jar sat on the bar at local pub the Pit, collecting donations for his bail money.

Nonetheless there were facts that didn't add up. Daunt testified that Truswell drove up to Daunt's Gold Hill claim, and began haranguing him from inside the truck.

"You're a gold thief. You stole off your parents ... You're not going to steal gold off this land any more," were Truswell's words, he testified. Daunt reached for his gun, and said, "Leave now." He fired one warning shot at Truswell. Tyre treads at the scene showed that Truswell backed up his truck, then accelerated toward where the first shot was fired from. Daunt testified that he fired twice more from that location.

But shell casings were spread out at the scene, suggesting that shots may have been fired from several locations. Crown Attorney David McWhinnie said Daunt might have been following the truck as he fired, suggesting the shooting wasn't in self-defence.

The jury might have taken that the conflict between Daunt's story and the forensic results into account when it found Daunt guilty.

Truswell wasn't consistently violent, although he had violent episodes. In Dawson City Truswell was given a wide berth. Parents warned their children away, pointing out Truswell's truck and telling kids to walk the other way if they saw it coming. But most people tried to live and let live.

Other miners would be hospitable whatever they thought of him.

"If Two-by-Four shows up at my claim and he's hungry I give him half what I got - that's just the way you live in the bush," said Earl Halvorson, a 17-year veteran of placer mining on Bonanza Creek.

But they all knew that Truswell could be dangerous."All us guys on the creek knew that Two-by-Four coulda got us any time," Halvorson said.

Many people in the area also knew the other side of Truswell, what Daunt's ex-girlfriend Josee Bonhomme calls "the OK Robert". At those times, Truswell was helpful and chatty - he would demonstrate gold panning to tourists or help other miners on their claims.

Raffles McDowell lived with Truswell and several other roommates in Fort McMurray in the late 70s. He doesn't remember any threatening incidents.

"I can't even remember what he did, but he was this exotic character from New Zealand," says McDowell. "Older, and kind of a world traveller kind of character, which I was impressed with."

Truswell had travelled. He had spent time mining for opals in Australia before he married a Canadian and made his way to North America, says his sister, Christina Wiggins. The marriage was short-lived, but the couple settled in Crippen Cove, a small community in Northern British Columbia, near Prince Rupert.

When Truswell left New Zealand, he was an ordinary kid. "His normal self - a happy, nice, kind brother," she says. But his volatile temper exhibited itself wherever he lived in Canada - Jeff Potter was a neighbour on Crippen Cove. He remembers Truswell chasing another man with a double-sided axe. No one was hurt. In Fort McMurray, he was quirky, but not dangerous. "He was earthy, I think he wore bare feet a bit, you know, which was unusual," says McDowell.

"He was obviously sort of uneducated but he had all these folk ideas about how to deal with ailments. You know he was into herbs and massage and body energy."

McDowell never had any trouble with Truswell. In fact, in later years, working as a boat builder in Dawson City, he ran into his old acquaintance.

"He also had this fantasy of owning a boat and sailing, just going off and being all by himself I assume. Which brought us together because I was then working on a boat. He was happy to see me, and we always had pleasant conversations."

When Truswell's father died in 2001, he returned to New Zealand.

He disagreed with his sisters' plans for his father's estate, and his dark side emerged again. He threatened to kill one of his sisters, ambushing her in their late father's house. Truswell was convicted of uttering threats, but wasn't required to serve his time, because he was scheduled to return to Canada. Wiggins is shocked by the change the years on the goldfields wrought on her brother. She believes that the mining life changed him.

"You see the thing is because he lived the last 30-odd years in the fields, and the miners are a law unto themselves, I don't think he understood the law of the country," she says.

It's possible that Truswell's ever increasing volatility was partly due to what Yukoners call "gold fever", the term they use to explain the strange behaviour of many of the miners that come into town after weeks or months alone on their claims. Symptoms include greed and paranoia.

"There is such a thing as gold fever," says McDowell, who has lived in the Yukon for 20 years.

"It's not just a desire to get gold. You meet people in springtime in Dawson who've spent the winter out in the woods and they're bushed. A lot of the time they're just sitting by themselves thinking, planning, hoping for things. Then they get into society and they don't really know how to behave."

Dawsonites' belief in gold fever might explain why Truswell's behaviour was tolerated so widely, even by police, who kept a record of complaints against him, but rarely took action.

It was well known in town that Truswell kept a hit list. He told Dave Algettson, a friend of Daunt's, that the list was carved into the dashboard of his Chevrolet Blazer. That idea frightened Algettson, who believed Truswell had shot at him as he drove his motorcycle past his mining claim, but most of the miners on the creek, were blase about his threats.

"There must have been a hundred people on that list," said Jerry Bride, who often spent time with Daunt and Truswell. "I'm not afraid of man or beast."

These are tough people. But even Bride had called the police once when Truswell refused to leave his property, telling the dispatcher "he's bigger than me".

In Yukon Supreme Court, Daunt testified that he was frightened by Truswell. In court, it was revealed that family tensions exacerbated his fear. Daunt had begun mining as a young man in the 70s when his father, Ivan Daunt, staked a few claims in the area. But Ivan a had a falling out with Kieran the summer before the shooting, over mining.

The year of the shooting, Ivan had hired Truswell to work on the claims he owned, because he would no longer work with his son. He also bought the land under his son's mining camp. Daunt believed Truswell and his father were in cahoots to take control of his mining operation.

As well, a week before, Daunt had received a warning from Wayne Hawkes, who told him that Truswell was making threats against his life.

But most people ignored Truswell's reputation. Sue Baker, who owned a cafe in Dawson City, and has mining claims in the area, hired Truswell to do some work. Initially, she didn't put the stories of Two-by-Four Bob together with the Robert Truswell who had stepped in just in time to get the necessary work done to maintain her claims. When she did, she was worried, but not terrified. "You have to live in Dawson to understand Dawson," she said in court.

"Shotgun Charlie scared me more than Two-by-Four. Shotgun Charlie shot someone. Dawson is pretty different in terms of behaviour."

Dawsonites may have a different standard, but the jury - six men and six women from Whitehorse, the Territorial capital - did not. After two weeks of testimony, Daunt was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.