The legacy of a killing

Robert Bushby always felt his family was different. And not in a good way.

His mother, for one, would act in outlandish ways. She would quarrel fiercely with her aunts. And for her entire life, she would say nothing about her father—Bushby’s grandfather—except that, apparently, he had died in a boxing match and was named Fred Magoon.

“I always realized there was something wrong with us,” he said.

Beyond his mother, the entire maternal lineage of his family tree was a question mark. Bushby had little contact with his mother’s sisters. He knew nothing of his grandfather except that he was long dead. And all he knew of his grandmother was that she came from a small town in the Maritimes. He heard she may have been Indigenous. That was basically it.

His great-grandparents were even less understood. All he knew of his mom’s grandfather was that his mother said she had once seen a picture of the man, and that he had massive legs and was apparently a cyclist and speed skater.

“That was all she knew,” Bushby, a longtime medical equipment repairman now living in Surrey, remembered.

And that might be all Bushby still knew if a family member on his father’s side hadn’t given him a crash course in genealogical research. The first revelation was the fact that Bushby, like many, had a tiny bit of royal blood in his background, being one of many descendents from a long, lost English King.

Bushby pried further into his past, and into the mystery of his mother’s family.

Ancestry.com led him to a “Fred Magoon,” who seemed like he could be his supposedly long-dead grandfather.

Magoon’s family tree listed descendents of whom he had never heard. When he found one of Fred’s granddaughters, she told him that Fred was a quiet religious guy, and certainly not the type of felllow who had another family.

“You have to be mistaken,” Bushby was told. So DNA tests were ordered.

The genetics didn’t lie. Fred Magoon was Bushby’s grandfather. He had found a legion of American cousins—and what became of his grandfather.

Fred Magoon had not died in a boxing match. Instead, on the date his daughter

was born, he had walked out of his family’s life never to return or appear again. Despite being very much alive and raising another family, Magoon would be declared dead upon the legal request of his ex-wife seven years after his disappearance.

Magoon, Bushby heard, would become a religious man. He was also troubled, prone to bouts of drunken isolation, stewing in moments from another time.

The discovery opened up an avalanche of revelations both about Fred, and his father, Jesse.

Jesse Magoon came from Worcester, Mass. Bushby learned that Jesse built a career working on electric railroad cars and started a family. Little Fred Magoon was born in 1901.

Bushby found records of Jesse Magoon in Boston newspapers, including one touting his victory at a five-mile cycling road race, where he blasted around the streets of Brookline, Mass., at an average speed of 35 km/h.

But Bushby could find few other records until he got a subscription to an online newspaper archive website, and came across a series of strange newspaper clippings.

Even so, the connection seemed off at first.

“I came across this Jesse Magoon character who died at Vedder Mountain and I’m looking at it going ‘They can’t be the same guy, because the guy I’m looking for is from Boston.’”

But as Bushby further probed his mother’s side of the family, he said he was “stunned” to realize that the murdered man in the Sumas Substation was, indeed, his great-grandfather.

“I found a piece of something that said something about Fred. And when I was able to realize that it was Fred’s dad I was looking at, I went ‘Oh, my gosh.’”

For Bushby, the discovery was about more than just learning how his great-grandfather had lived and died. He also saw the traces of an origin story for his own family’s dysfunction.

After losing his father as he was entering adolescence, Fred Magoon had grown up a wildman and a boxer. An early-century photo shows him posing in a boxing stance. One family story had Fred throwing a fight and triggering the ire of the mob.

Bushby discovered Fred had married his grandmother Selma after she had sired a child with a wealthy Vancouver man. After the man, who would become a prominent lawyer, left Selma, she took up with his friend, Magoon.

In Bushby’s telling, it all becomes very tangled and soap opera-like—sometimes in extremely dark ways.

Eventually, Bushby would trace that disorder back to Jesse Magoon, a seemingly upright man and father, and the fate that befell him at the Sumas Substation in 1915.

“It was a bit of a shock,” he said. “My grandfather Fred obviously had a lot of emotional issues from it all.”

Bushby felt his family was different and a little screwed up. Lots of people, of course, feel that way. Fred Magoon had a brother who seemed to turn out all right and who lived a normal life.

But Bushby can’t help connecting that killing a century ago to his own struggles growing up.

“Looking at my family, they had their issues more than a lot of people I know,” he said “It destroyed our family.”

Today, a century after the killing, Bushby thinks his family is recovering. Having reconnected with his long-lost relatives, he started a Facebook page to discuss the family’s fascinating history. The Magoon descendants discovered Jesse had been buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver and Bushby and his family had a plaque made and installed.

“With all the stuff that had happened in the family, [I was happy to] go through that and say ‘That honour has been given to him,’” Bushby said.