Stephen Reid | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Stephen Reid

Stephen Reid, writer, bank robber (born 13 March 1950 in Massey, ON; died 13 June 2018 in Haida Gwaii, BC). Best known for his novel, Jackrabbit Parole (1986) and his collection of essays, A Crowbar in The Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison (2012), Stephen Reid was a founding member of the infamous Stopwatch Gang.

Early Life and the Stopwatch Gang

Stephen Reid was the second of nine children born to Douglas Reid and Sylvia Shiels, in Massey, Ontario. At the age of 13, he hitchhiked west to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lived around East Hastings Street, an area notorious for drugs and crime.

Reid returned to Northern Ontario a few times, but for the most part he lived on his own during his teenage years, fueling a heroin and cocaine addiction with a wide range of criminal activity that frequently landed him in jail. At around the age of 23 or 24, he met Patrick Mitchell in Ottawa, eight years his senior, and together with Lionel Wright they formed the Stopwatch Gang. The group was named for its members’ tradition of wearing stopwatches around their necks during bank robberies, which ensured that they never took longer than 90 seconds to finish a job.

The Stopwatch Gang pulled off the biggest Canadian gold robbery ever recorded ($785,000 worth of gold from an Ottawa airport), the biggest bank robbery in San Diego, California history ($283,000 US Dollars) and about 100 other bank robberies from Seattle, Washington to Miami, Florida to Montréal, Québec. Reid broke out of prison on numerous occasions, and also helped colleagues escape, once dressing up as a surgeon in order to free Patrick Mitchell from a prison ambulance. Reid was on the FBI’s most wanted list and in 1980 he was arrested during an FBI raid in Arizona. He served time in Marion Penitentiary in Illinois before his extradition to Canada.

Mid-Life

Stephen Reid began his writing career in 1984 while serving a 21-year prison sentence at the Kent Institution, a maximum security prison in Agassiz, British Columbia. He wrote poetry and later completed the manuscript of a novel while in prison, which he submitted to Susan Musgrave, who was at the time writer-in-residence at University of Waterloo. Musgrave and Reid developed a correspondence and married in 1986, behind prison walls. Reid also published his first and only novel, Jackrabbit Parole, in 1986. One year later, he was released from prison on parole.

Jackrabbit Parole is a wild, semi-autobiographical story of bank robbery, prison escape, love and incarceration, written in prose at once hard-boiled, witty and philosophical. The novel was a success, and perhaps due to his sensational criminal biography, Reid received a great deal of media attention, something he would later bemoan. “I was presenting an image,” he said in a 2014 interview with Vice magazine. “Much of it with the cooperation of the people who were covering me in the media — and that was a huge mistake.”

After his release from prison in 1987, Reid lived with Susan Musgrave and raised their two daughters, Charlotte Musgrave and Sophie Musgrave Reid, on Vancouver Island. He continued to write — screenplays, essays, fiction — and also taught creative writing at Camosun College in Victoria and worked as a youth counselor in the Northwest Territories.

Reid continued to struggle with drug addiction and in June 1999 he walked into a bank in Victoria with a loaded shotgun, high on cocaine. He made off with $93,000, firing at a police officer during the car chase that ensued. Reid was sentenced to 18 years in prison for attempted murder and armed robbery.

Later Life

In 2012, Reid published A Crowbar in a Buddhist Garden: Writing from Prison, a collection of autobiographical essays written from inside prison. It won the 2013 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. The tone of A Crowbar in a Buddhist Garden is more frank and introspective than his freewheeling and action-packed novel, Jackrabbit Parole; yet, it contains a great deal of wit. For instance, in an essay about the absurdity of the Violent Offenders Program, Reid ponders what would happen to certain infamous criminals if they were to be enrolled: “Would Billy The Kid become Billy The Inner-child?’’

In Junkie, the longest essay in the collection, Reid writes about his first taste of morphine: he was eleven years old and it was given to him by a pedophile, a suave, middle-aged doctor, who kept him hooked — and sexually abused him — for the next two years. “I slipped away to become the ghost of my own boyhood,” Reid writes in Junkie of his 13-year-old self who took off from Northern Ontario, heading towards the carnival of drugs and crime of East Hastings Street that would consume his teenage years. “Heroin addicts,” Reid writes, “want to stop the world from spinning, to fix a point in time where it is safe — an embryonic state, the place before the loss.”

Reid was on day parole in a Victoria-area halfway house from February 2014 to August 2015, at which point he was granted a statutory release, having served two thirds of his sentence.

Awards

Stephen Reid was the Subject of a 2007 NFB documentary, Inside Time, which received a 2008 Golden Sheaf Award for social/political documentary. A Crowbar in The Buddhist Garden won the 2013 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.

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