Did Theresa Bull gaze at the death certificate of her now late husband, realizing that she’d messed up when she told her kids he shot himself when in fact he had drowned?
Or did she merely fold up the document, put it away where no one would find it, then deliver them the news of their father’s alleged suicide by gun after the fact?
How much did she know?
What did she do?
It couldn’t have mattered to her right then. Frederick was dead. It was over. She had to move forward. If she indeed messed up her and John Walker’s plan when she told the kids Frederick shot himself, it never showed, and the slip-up certainly never reached the ears of the police, which leads me to believe her kids never saw their father’s death certificate.
Image by Sergii Koviarov from Pixabay
The fact that he drowned wouldn’t become a known detail until his great-granddaughter ordered the certificate out of an obsessive curiosity almost a century later. Sometimes I wonder: if the gunshot had been listed on the certificate, would I have taken it as murder, or would I, too, have accepted the suicide story? So many times, I have read about real cases which unravelled with the drop of one minuscule detail.
This year, 2023, was the hundred-year anniversary of Frederick’s death. It seemed fitting to write about it and tell his story publicly online. I wish even one of his kids were still alive so someone involved could have learned the truth. Maybe one of them could have at least died with some closure. But they never received that, and it tore the family apart in the years to follow.
Sometime following their mother’s marriage to John Walker, the kids all stopped talking to each other and their mother. Despite being in Canada at the same time, Mom says that Ann and my grandma didn’t talk for quite a few years.
Frederick and Theresa’s only son, referred to as Fred Jr or “Uncle Fred” by one of my mother’s cousins who knew him, appears to have led a quiet existence following his father’s death. Their daughters, Ann, Veronica, and Theresa, all went on to have their own families and lives.
The cousin who so fondly remembered Fred Jr is one of Veronica’s sons, and told me that Fred, as an adult, got a job down on the docks due to his father’s excellent reputation among those who knew him. Fred Jr was born in 1916, and died in 1982. As of now, I have no idea if he ever got married or had kids. “Frederick Bull” remained a very popular name into that generation, so until I can find a way to narrow down the records, this remains a mystery.
“I used to see my Uncle Fred up until the 1970s, he used to take me to the pub on a Sunday, lunch time, when I was about 13 or 14,” the cousin told me. Fred would visit Veronica and her family in Norfolk during that time.
“I was young and he was a BIG London guy who was really cool,” the cousin said, but he didn’t recall Fred Jr ever discussing sensitive family matters.
Veronica, born in 1921, was still a toddler when her father died. Losing him, then having a stepfather enter the picture must have been a confusing time for her, being at an age where kids don’t truly comprehend the concept of death or the bizarre circumstances surrounding this one in particular. She grew up to marry a man named Evan Harold Costin, and they had three sons together. They raised their family in Norfolk. My mother refers to her as “Aunt Mickey.”
My grandmother, Theresa, was born in 1918, and was only five when her dad died. She didn’t stick around the family, going to London to become a dispatcher during World War II in the office where she’d eventually meet my grandfather, Cecil Thompson. Of all ironies, he was working in that office on modified duties… due to an injured arm. They married in 1946 right after the war and emigrated to Canada in 1947, eventually settling in Gibsons, British Columbia. It was a tiny oceanfront town then, and while it remains small today, it’s become a huge tourist place. My mother often reflects on how quiet it was back in the 60s and 70s when she grew up there. Theresa and Cecil had three kids; two sons and a daughter, all who grew up on the stunning Sunshine Coast, in a quaint little community where they both sought to escape their lives in England. (Grandpa has a story all his own which I will also research more of and write about after this series.)
The Sunshine Coast (photo taken by Lavinia Thompson)
While three of the four kids seemed to settle into a fairly normal adulthood, one wouldn’t shake the ghosts of the past. Annie was born in 1919, the second youngest. For whatever reason, be it family dynamics, coping with trauma differently than her siblings, or the weird sixth sense she seemed to have about her father’s death, Ann became a wild contradiction to her siblings. True to the family though, details of her life remain vague.
Ann married Hugh Anderson, a Canadian soldier she met in England (according to Mom’s cousin) in April 1943 and gave birth to a son, John, in 1949. They married in England, and John was born in Vancouver, BC, Canada. After they arrived in Canada, it becomes hard to track her. Not only is Ann Anderson a wildly common name, much like John Walker, but Canadian records aren’t as in-depth as they were in England.
That being said, records are scarce on Ancestry for Canada, I find. The 1921 Canadian Census is on Ancestry, but honestly I know so little about Hugh and his parents, that I could spend another decade the way I did John Walker sifting through records. I’ll keep looking, but for the sake of this post, I must settle for not knowing much yet.
“I know that when Mom and Dad came to Canada, they made their way to Alberta from Montreal and stayed with Ann and her husband,” Mom tells me. “Then my parents left the farm and went to B.C. because of the drinking. My parents didn’t drink much so I guess they were not too impressed.”
Mom tells me that Ann remained in Canada though, even after she and Hugh split up. They were off and on again for a while, apparently, until Ann remarried a man who we only know by his last name, McBride. I cannot find any marriage records for Ann and him, though. It’s possible that marriage was annulled, as that would erase any records of it ever happening.
What we do know is that John went to live with my grandparents sometime in the late fifties, when my mother was young, due to Ann having problems with her marriage and drinking. Mom says Ann found my grandparents and sent John to live with them for a while. He wound up staying there throughout most of his elementary school years. Mom recalls that she used to introduce John as her brother instead of her cousin.
The drinking and relationship problems seemed to plague Ann. It caused many problems in the family, though Mom says she thinks it was John’s refusal to go home that made Ann finally straighten out. By 1988, she was single. Mom says that was the last time she saw Ann, when she stopped at my grandma’s on the day of my dad’s funeral in November 1988. Mom was pregnant with me at the time my dad died in a logging truck accident on Remembrance Day.
My grandparents saw Ann and John after that up until Grandpa sold the house in Gibsons. I know Mom and John lost contact eventually and we don’t know what happened to him. To our knowledge, he remained out in Vancouver and could still be there. Mom says she think he went into communications or something after joining and serving in the Navy.
The Sunshine Coast (photo by Lavinia Thompson)
However, Mom doesn’t really recall where Ann’s belief that Frederick was murdered came from. Mom says that as a kid, she would overhear tidbits of conversation between my grandma and Ann. Ann definitely thought her father was murdered, and that it was no accident or suicide. But between her multiple marriages, her drinking problem, and her tendency for drama in those years before sobering up, her siblings simply called her crazy.
You really weren’t crazy, though, Auntie Ann.
She definitely showed signs of unresolved trauma, but I don’t think she was crazy to think such a thing. I came to believe the same upon looking into it. Did Ann have the same obsession with Frederick’s death in a time where she lacked access to the records and ability to access the information? Is that what made her seem crazy, the obsession with no way to back it up? The generational trauma felt by this death that sent ripples of poison through roots for decades to come?
Because it’s a pretty telling sign that you traumatized your kids when they don’t speak to you or each other for years until your funeral, and it’s far too late to heal the damage done, or come out with the truth. Theresa took the truth about Frederick and John and whatever love triangle and resulting violence to her grave. It resides in the dirt now, roots forever tainted by words unsaid, truths untold. My grandmother and her siblings kept swallowing that poison in silence, and took the rest of the secrets to their graves.
Theresa died on April 8, 1966 at 17 Jacksons Court, Brading Crescent, Wanstead, London, with an estate of £315, which would be just over $12,000 CAD today. In her later years, she cleaned houses to make ends meet as John didn’t work.
It seems he wasn’t terribly useful, either. John was discharged from his work as a ship steward by the time of the 1939 registry. They both died in a most unremarkable fashion, as most of us do, but without the affection in memory her kids gave to Frederick.
Even after her death, they wouldn’t speak much of her.
Back in June, I posted about the 100-year anniversary of Frederick’s death. Reading back on it, the ruminations stand true still. I reflected on why a century-old death and potential murder matters to me. Anyone can understand why Ann could have obsessed: it was her beloved father, whom her mother abruptly replaced with a man none of them even liked. Was Theresa so inherently selfish as to dispose of Frederick and let her kids be torn apart by it? Was John just a cunning man who got the woman he wanted at whatever cost, or did they act together?
Why lie to your kids if it was an accident or a suicide?
At the heart of it all, that’s the question we will never have answered. The speculation will forever swirl about like dead autumn leaves on the wind, while the toxic roots await underground for spring, for the next generation of young seedlings and flowers to pollute.
Photo by Lavinia Thompson
But it doesn’t have to…
If there is anything I have taken away from all this, it has been standing face-to-face with mortality, the things we leave behind when we die, and understanding generational trauma on a personal level. I think, when we do that, we are more able to look at the future and stand tall in the affirmation that we won’t make the same mistakes, and we won’t become the same version of our ancestors.
I look at Theresa and I see a woman who wished to dispose of the husband she had in exchange for a younger, more useful one, even at the expense of her kids, and her reputation. With one little lie, regardless of the truth or intention, she left that legacy for herself. If she didn’t kill Frederick or have anything to do with it, she sure didn’t do much to dispel that, and she let her kids clamber their way through life, be it fleeing England after the war or falling to the bottom of the bottle.
It’s not at all what Frederick would have wanted for his kids, based on what I know of him. He left a legacy of love and hard-work and perseverance. His children never doubted his love for them. And that was robbed from them.
But I think it is his legacy, despite everything else, that stands out to me. Of all the generational trauma that has come since, of everything I have been through in my own life, and what my mother and grandmother went through in theirs, that shone through the darkness of his death and the ripple effects: love, compassion, kindness, and perseverance.
A house doesn’t make a home.
The house in which Theresa lived with John following her husband’s death, the ironically named Forget-Me-Not villa, wasn’t a home to her kids. They vacated and found walls and families of their own to call such. But no matter where they scattered to, they always had their father’s love to call home, too. And it seems that, despite their mother’s attempts to erase him from history, they never forgot that, or him. Neither will I.
Photo by Lavinia Thompson