Who: Stanley Roy Wallis, 41
What: Homicide. Shot six times at close range
When: Last seen leaving his Saanich home on April 27, 1973.
Where: Body found at Shawnigan Lake on April 29, 1973
A mysterious call from "Mr. Murdoch" sent Victoria businessman Stanley Roy Wallis to a meeting from which he has never returned.
The handsome and charismatic former president of the Victoria Junior Chamber of Commerce drove to a remote area of Shawnigan Lake to see the supposed Mr. Murdoch, who had phoned his secretary a day earlier to request some sort of business meeting.
The call was suspicious and so was the location -- a little-used logging road known as a good place to practise target shooting.
Nonetheless, Wallis agreed to meet face-to-face.
When he arrived, police believe he was immediately ambushed. He was then shot six times at close range with a small-calibre pistol.
That was April 27, 1973. Two days later, a passing hiker found the 41-year-old businessman's body about 12 metres from his car, partly covered by a seat pulled from the nearby wreck of another abandoned vehicle.
RCMP tried using a police dog but couldn't find the killer's scent. Residents reported a white Volkswagen in the area that day, but Mounties never tracked down the car's owner. A constable at the time said the case had "all the designs of a gangland killing."
A 1975 Daily Colonist story quotes police officers as saying they eliminated robbery as a motive -- although it doesn't say why -- and while they focused on "three or four people or groups of people" the leads eventually dried up.
Meanwhile, Victoria's gossip mill was furiously digesting the murder and churning out theories.
There was the one about a high-stakes poker game that Wallis had played in several days earlier on board a boat in the harbour. Or the $19,000 he reportedly lost from his gambling habit. Or the rumour he was having an affair with the wife of another local businessman. Or his testimony against some sort of unsavoury character in a Vancouver court case just prior to his murder.
The Wallis family, including his widow, Syvlia, and four children, heard them all.
"People looked at you sideways, I remember that at school," said daughter Cindy, who was 16 at the time and is now 51 and still living in Victoria. "In those days there was no grief counselling for kids."
Wallis's brother, Ray, refused to go to his reunion at Mount View High School because he said all anyone wanted to talk about was the murder.
The family, left with no answers, wrestled to control an "edge of fear" that exists to this day, said Cindy. "I remember being very frightened and unable to go downstairs."
Wallis's other children, Vicki, Patrick and Lorraine, struggled in their own ways, she said.
Her father had an easy, outgoing personality and loved to help others, she said. He also had smouldering good looks and a way with the ladies that made for comparisons with Dean Martin, she said.
One of her last memories of her father was the day before his ill-fated meeting, when she was standing in the Douglas Street offices of Evergreen Cottage builders, an Island-based company that sold pre-cut houses, in which Wallis was a partner. She heard his secretary call out Mr. Murdoch's name across the room. Her father called back to agree to the meeting, and then she left with her dad to practise driving before her learner's licence test.
After the murder, Cindy said she tried to keep in touch with RCMP investigators, who at the time had an office in Colwood.
Although the family says they felt police did all they could to properly investigate the murder, there were a few snags.
Cindy recalls an RCMP investigator who made advances toward Syliva. And then there was the officer who didn't return calls, and when a teenaged Cindy went to the Colwood RCMP detachment to ask for an update said: "Do you want to see the pictures?"
"I never went back," said Cindy.
The last the family heard from RCMP was 20 years ago, said Cindy. They don't even know if the case is still open.
The file sits with Mounties at the Shawnigan Lake detachment, and hasn't been turned over to the Island Major Crime Unit or the province's unsolved homicide unit.
Shawnigan Lake Sgt. Rob Webb said the case "appears inactive" but was unable to say exactly when investigators had last reviewed the file.
"What do you do? Thirty-five years have gone by," said Cindy.
"We have all made probably bad decisions in our life based on grief and being a little screwed up," she added.
"I'd like very much to know why would the person do this? ... Why would you destroy a family?"
"I'd just like to not see someone get away with it," added Ray, Wallis's brother, now 79.
But after so much time, the Wallis family -- which now includes what would be Stanley's great-great grandchildren -- isn't sure how they'd react to someone coming forward with a confession or new information to finally close the case.
"I wonder if it would help Vicki and Patrick heal," said Cindy. "It might even help me.
"He's gone, there's no closure.
"But the why would be great. Don't ask me for closure, because I can't find that."
Rob Shaw can be reached at 250-380-5350 or [email protected]
