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The Mysterious Charred Man of Rogers Pass

The Rogers Pass section of the Trans-Canada Highway cuts through some of the most rugged mountain terrain in Canada. A large part of the highway route lies in Glacier and Revelstoke National Parks and has not been impacted by logging. Much of the eastern slope of the Selkirk Mountains along the highway is outside the park system. Every creek valley outside the park has a logging road into the upper reaches and the scars of modern clearcut logging are very evident. It was on one of these logging roads that this story begins.

Two young men were driving along the highway toward Golden from Revelstoke in the very early hours of the morning. They had just crossed the boundary out of Glacier Park and were talking about switching drivers when they saw the headlights of a car facing them. They were still some distance away when they realized that it was not moving. They could see that there was something or someone moving around on the highway in front of the parked car. They slowed and moved to the right, thinking the car may have hit an animal and that the animal might get into their path as well. They watched closely to determine what was happening, unable to see clearly because of the glare from the light beams of the stationary car.

As they came almost alongside the car and were partly out of the direct beam of the headlights, they saw that what they had thought was an animal was in fact a man on his hands and knees a few feet from the front of the car. They stopped to find out what was happening and to offer assistance. Nothing could have prepared them for what they met on the dark road that night. The lights from the car revealed a person who would have been unrecognizable even to his best friend. The person was black from head to toe, burned so badly that his ears and nose were gone. His eyelids and mouth would no longer move, and all his clothing was burned away except for the partial remains of a pair of jockey shorts and his ankle high boots. He was wringing his hands, begging for help, and pleading for a drink of water. As he wrung his hands, the skin peeled away up to his wrists and complete tubes of skin pulled off his fingers.

The two young men found a bottle of pop in their car and gave it to the man, but he was unable to get the bottle to his mouth. One of the helpers held the bottle and tried to get some of the liquid into the unmoving mouth. The man was over six feet tall and he had gotten to his feet when the helpers approached, which made the providing of a drink almost impossible. They helped the burned man into the back seat of their car, moved the other car to the shoulder of the highway, and sped toward Golden. Enroute, the burned man began to wail and scream whenever he was not begging for water. The smell of burned flesh filled the car and before long both of the helpers had vomited until they could bring up nothing more. The twenty miles to Golden were, and will always remain, the longest piece of road those two had ever travelled.

At last the lights of the community could be seen ahead. It was two thirty in the morning when they pulled into the first service station that was open. There happened to be a small café attached to the gasoline station and both sides of the business remained open twenty-four hours a day.

Golden is situated at the confluence of the Kicking Horse River and the Columbia River. There are no all-night services for almost one hundred miles to the east and ninety miles to the west. Everyone who travels that route at night will stop in Golden for fuel and food, resulting in the all-night places being continually busy.

There were twenty-five or thirty people sitting around having snacks or coffee when the burned man lurched into the bright lights of the café and asked for water. He was followed by the young men who had found him on the highway, who had now partially recovered from the initial shock of what they had found. They got the burned man onto a chair and began to pour glass after glass of water into the charred hole that had been his mouth. Someone called for an ambulance and the police. The café emptied.

One of the young constables from Golden arrived and was told the story by the two helpers. He was able to converse with the burned man in a very limited way; however, it was obvious that the man did not wish to tell him how he had been burned. The man said he had been camping alone in the mountains when it happened. An ambulance soon arrived and took him to the hospital in Golden.

One of the few doctors in the small community happened to be at the hospital when the ambulance arrived. No one, including the doctor, had ever seen a living person that badly burned. The doctor was amazed that the man had not lost consciousness. The doctor determined that there was little that could be done for him. He tried, without success, to find a vein to inject pain medication, and he attempted to give pain killers by mouth and by intra-muscular injection but these things appeared to have little if any effect.

The man had totally lost control by the time he arrived at the hospital. He would not respond to questions or requests and he frantically thrashed about, moaning and screaming and trying to get up from the emergency-room bed. Restraint straps were placed over his pelvic area and legs. His continual movement made the spectacle that much more gruesome.

The doctor told the constable that the man would soon drown and that there was no way to delay or prevent it. He said that the lungs are very dependent on the skin, and that in severe burn cases involving large portions of the skin, the most common complication is a rapid fluid build-up in the lungs. The fluid build-up increases in proportion to the amount of skin that has been burned, and drowning is the actual cause of death in most severe burn cases.

The man died about four long hours after he arrived at the hospital. The staff from the little hospital went home totally exhausted that morning.

Meanwhile, the night shift officer had driven out and found the abandoned car, which was towed to secure storage. It had been parked near a logging road that branched off the highway and went up a creek valley into the mountains.The side road appeared to be a good place to start looking for clues about the mysterious burned man. This incident happened in the late fall and there was snow on the ground in the higher areas of the Rogers Pass. There was no snow where the car had been found, but as the constable drove up the road in the darkness he reached an elevation where the recent snowfall still covered the ground. There were tire tracks visible in the snow. Close examination of these tracks indicated that only one vehicle had been up and down the road since the snow; the tire impressions were similar to the tires on the car where the burned man had been found. The constable followed the tracks up the logging road in the snow. After about three miles, the road came into a clearing where forestry operations had gathered logs prior to hauling them out. The leveled area of the clearing was at the point where the creek valley split, and a road went into each of the branches of the valley. The same tire tracks were visible on both roads leading further into the mountains.

The constable picked the road to the left from the landing area and followed the tracks. The snow on the ground was getting deeper with the increased elevation and he could see that the vehicle had been having some difficulty due to the lack of traction. The police vehicle was equipped with four-wheel drive and had no trouble in the snow. The tracks showed where the suspect car had lost traction on a steep part of the road and had to back down and get a better run to get over that area. The driver of the car showed a considerable degree of driving skill to maintain control and to force the car through the adverse conditions.

After about another two miles on the left fork of the logging road, the policeman came onto another cleared and leveled area, called a landing, where logs were gathered. This landing was smaller than the previous one at the first fork and was covered with nearly three inches of snow. The tracks of the suspect vehicle circled the landing and indicated the vehicle had parked by some scrap logs on a level area at one side. The heat from the engine of the parked vehicle had melted the snow to the ground, indicating that it had been there for some time. The scrap logs had been rolled around so that they formed a rough half circle about five feet in diameter; a small fire had burned out in the centre of the circle. The fire site was about ten feet from where the car had been parked. A stick was propped across one of the logs so that one end extended over the fire and a small metal pot with a wire handle was sitting on one of the logs at the side of the fire pit; the pot was blackened from fire.

The person who camped had heated some water or prepared food over the fire. Cut marks on a log near the fire were from an axe being used to break up and split wood. The snow was packed by foot prints all around the fire area and between there and the vehicle; tracks wandered around the landing as the camper had gathered wood for the fire. Tracks led a few yards away from the car and the fire to where a man had urinated in the snow on two or possibly three occasions. The foot tracks on the landing all appeared to be from the same pair of shoes; they were about a size eleven man’s boot very similar to the charred remains of the boots worn by the burned man.

A three-gallon plastic gasoline can was lying in the snow a few yards from the fire. The can smelled of gasoline but there was no liquid left in it. The threaded cap was hanging from a plastic strap around the neck of the can. The can sat in the snow with the opening toward the top; had there been fuel remaining in the container when it was placed there, it would not have spilled. The packed snow between the car and the fire showed traces of colour where small splashes of gasoline had been spilled. Traces of partially burned and melted clothing were in and around the ashes of the fire, and similar particles were in the snow all around where the vehicle had been parked. The snow beside the vehicle, on the side away from the fire, was flattened in about a ten-foot circle where a person had been rolling and thrashing around. Burned and melted pieces of clothing were mixed in the snow throughout this rolled area. A melted nylon zipper, possibly from a jacket, was the largest and about the only piece that could be identified.

The evidence at the camp site seemed to indicate the man had been there for a few hours and that he had been alone. It appeared he had opened the gasoline container and poured the contents over himself, then tossed the empty container to one side and walked into the fire. He caught fire from head to foot, moved around the parked car at least one full circle, and then began to fight the fire by rolling and thrashing around in the snow. The extensive burning to his head and face indicated that he had remained standing for some time during the fire.

The fire on the man and his clothing burned itself out or was extinguished by his rolling in the snow. By the time the fire was extinguished, the man was nearly nude; his waist belt, part of his trousers and most of his underwear were all that remained, along with most of his boots and the portion of his socks that was inside the boots.

After the fire had burned out, the man got into his car, started it and drove toward the highway. He spun the wheels in the snow for the first few yards but then controlled the car and drove it with the caution necessary to traverse the slippery and steep road. When he reached the large landing below where he had been camped, he became lost and started up the other fork of the road, away from the highway. He drove up the narrow road for nearly a mile to the first place where he could safely turn the car around, and then he turned the car by moving it back and forth and steering to the extreme right and left. He then returned to the log landing and found the road to the highway.

After daylight that morning the area where the car had been parked on the highway was searched. Patches of skin from his hands were located, along with the complete skin from several fingers. The fingers still had the details of fingerprints and were later used to establish positive identity of the dead man.

The contents of the car were viewed and listed in detail. The car was packed full of personal effects, camping gear and books. We concluded that the man had been living in the car or camping from the car for a considerable time prior to his death. Many of the books in the car were textbooks and manuals dealing with engineering. We asked a civil engineer to have a look at the books. He felt that the owner of a collection of books like that was either an engineer or was in the advanced stages of becoming one.

The car also contained three thick volumes about devil worship. These books were worn and dirty. Each one had several bookmarks at pages which were noticeably more worn and dog-eared than the other pages of the books.

News of the person who had burned to death at Golden spread rapidly. Within a day of the incident, people from the construction camp at Mica Creek, where a hydro dam was being built on the Columbia River, contacted us saying they thought they knew who the dead person was. Although we could only give a vague description of the man—his height and weight, but very little more—our description of the car and that it was packed full of effects left little room for doubt.

The mystery man had worked at the Mica Creek construction site on several occasions since the project had started, and most recently during the past ten days. He was a very well-qualified civil engineer who had first come onto the site in the beginning stages of construction, and had convinced the engineering staff to let him demonstrate his skill at planning and drawing some portions of the project. His work was excellent; the management people at the project would have been pleased to have him as part of their team, but he would finish a small project and then disappear. He had returned to the site for the third time on this last occasion and, like each time before, there was a project for him and he tackled it with determination and skill.

The man was described as a social misfit who was a loner to the extreme; he would write notes to others at the site when he could have turned his chair and spoken with them. He would eat his meals in the camp dining hall, but he would always go there at quiet times and sit in an area away from everyone else. Some had approached him in the dining hall, but they found that he was so ill-at-ease with them that he would get up and leave before he finished his meal.

We obtained a name, address, birth date, and next of kin from the employment records at the construction site. This information matched with the registration records of the car and was later confirmed by the fingerprints we had picked up on the highway. He had been fingerprinted years earlier when he was employed in a high security project in eastern Canada.

His family was traumatized, but not surprised, by the news of his death. He had been an ideal child, an excellent student, and a very promising young adult. He graduated with honors as a civil engineer and had undertaken additional studies to gain further qualifications. It was during his later studies that his personality changed and he withdrew from all others. He shunned everyone; his family had not heard from him for about five years.

The coroner’s inquiry ruled that the death was suicide, and attached no blame to any living person.