The Murder of Janet Smith

Janet Smith, was a Scottish twenty-two-year-old nursemaid working for a wealthy family in Vancouver, B.C. She worked alongside Chinese servant Wong Foon Sing. On July 26, 1924, Janet Smith’s body was discovered in the basement. She had suffered a gunshot wound, minor burns, and injuries.Janet Smith’s case was not a cut and dry case. The police originally declared her death a suicide, and had her body embalmed without even doing a post mortem.But after Smith’s friends started to protest her suicide verdict, and the story was picked up by local newspapers, her body was exhumed, and coroners did another investigation. This time, her cause of death was changed from suicide to murder.Wong Foon Sing was considered the prime suspect in her murder, although there wasn’t a single shred of evidence against him. Mostly, he was considered a suspect because he was Asian, and Vancouver was rife with anti-Asian sentiments.Wong was brought in for questioning, and when that failed to produce a confession, he was kidnapped by a group of men wearing KKK robes. For six weeks, Wong was held captive, threatened, beaten, and tortured. But despite all the trauma, Wong refused to stray from his original story - and he refused to confess to killing her. And when he was released, Wong was arrested, and went through a murder trial. Charges were dismissed, because there was zero evidence against him.It was discovered that the kidnappers had been mostly police officers, intent on getting Wong to confess. People knew where he was being held, such as Attorney General Manson, and refused to act. This horrifying information, coupled with the fact that many people believed the Janet Smith case had been a police coverup, made Smith’s murder especially disturbing.There have been many theories about who killed Janet Smith, from her potential involvement with her boss’s international drug smuggling business, to her death being attributed to a drug-fuelled party filled with wealthy playboys who bribed police. Janet Smith’s death still remains unsolved to this day. Her grisly murder is a devasting one, not just because Smith’s life was cut short, but also because of the way racist Vancouver residents treated Wong Foon Sing during the investigation, blaming him for a sordid crime without evidence to back up their claims.