How a DNA test took Heather Sumner on a journey over the high seas to uncover one desperate act in B.C., recorded by The Vancouver Sun, that would tell her everything about the heart of the man she would never get to meet.
When Heather Sumner decided to search for her birth father, she wasn’t dreaming of a fairy-tale ending. She didn’t need one.
The New Zealander had lived a charmed and blissfully unremarkable life growing up in Wellington with loving adoptive parents and two doting older brothers.
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Nor did she imagine a DNA test would take her on a journey over the high seas, through the lowest depths of misery, to reveal a life of slim chances, and even slimmer hopes — or that she would uncover one desperate act in British Columbia, recorded by The Vancouver Sun, that would tell her everything about the heart of the man she would never get to meet.
“It started as a bit of a joke,” said Sumner, 66.
Nothing was missing from her life, she was just curious.
In 1999, when New Zealand relaxed laws on closed adoptions, the reference librarian decided to investigate her origin. Did she have another name? Sally or Edna or Hazel? Was her birth mother still alive? Did she have siblings?
Those questions were sorted as quickly as reference books on a shelf. Yes, she had been named Kathleen Marie. (Bit of relief there: she prefers Heather.) Yes, her birth mother was alive. And there were five half-siblings.
But her birth father was a mystery. Her birth mother didn’t want to talk about him.
“I had his name on a hospital document,” said Sumner. “She confirmed his name, Stanley Thomas Taylor, told me that he was English, and when he had left New Zealand.”
Stanley Taylor was a common name. “There were hundreds of them in Britain,” said Sumner.
Undaunted, Sumner joined Ancestry.com, spit in a tube, and supplied her DNA. The results turned up several second and third-cousin matches. Finally, she found a first cousin.
“Scientifically there wasn’t any doubt that I had the right Stanley Thomas Taylor.”
But none had a photo.
Next, she traced Taylor’s movements through Ancestry’s travel databases. Taylor was born in Liverpool, travelled to Australia and New Zealand, left New Zealand before Sumner’s birth, went to Canada, but was deported from Canada in 1958.
Why had he been deported? By this time, her file was “thick as a phone book.”
Through newspapers.com, she began to scour Canadian periodicals.
His name turned up a Vancouver Sun front page, dated Jan. 25, 1957, with a photo of a man in the back of a police car. He was wearing a fedora and his eyes were covered with a black bar. “Seaman Stanley Thomas Taylor, 27, of no fixed address, has been charged with robbery,” the article stated.
Taylor had held up the Royal Bank at 685 West Hastings, but a “cordon” of bank staff surrounded him to “wall off his escape.” Taylor didn’t resist but “lolled lazily” against the counter. Police captured him. The article stated that the accused “had been tested on the drunkometer which showed a reading of .157.”
“My husband’s eyes were glazing over with boredom through all of this, but when I found the newspaper article he became quite interested,” said Sumner.
She still had to find out if the bank robber was the same Stanley Taylor who had been deported. Her birth father. And she longed to see a photo of his whole face.
Her husband suggested a private investigator. Canada, after all, was the other side of the world.
No need.
“Never underestimate the power of a librarian,” said Sumner. “I had the patience and the persistence and I could think outside the box for where to look.”
She pressed on. The Vancouver Police Department confirmed Taylor’s 1957 arrest but didn’t have a mug shot. Immigration Canada found a document showing a deportee named Stanley Thomas Taylor had been incarcerated at Stony Mountain prison in Manitoba. Stony Mountain archivists discovered that same Taylor had been transferred from a B.C. penitentiary.
It was him.
There was one more piece of the puzzle.
Fittingly it was a librarian, The Vancouver Sun and Province’s Carolyn Soltau, who found the original photo of Sumner’s birth father in the newspaper’s archives. The black bar over his eyes had been applied with ink — a rudimentary precursor to Photoshop. Soltau carefully removed the ink, and the full picture appeared.
“That was the real moment for me,” said Sumner. “To see his face.”
A deeper dive into news stories surrounding his arrest revealed more. Taylor had approached a teller, said he was desperate and added, “This is a stickup, give me amount (sic) money you got.”
But when the teller gave him the money, he pushed it away, and said he didn’t want it. At trial, he explained that he had been released from the city jail a couple of days before (he had been picked up for “loitering with intent in front of a wine store”). Now he wanted to go back to jail.
“He had been out of work for a month, he had no place to live and he had been drinking for two days in the beer hall,” said Sumner. “He didn’t want to hurt anyone, he just needed a place to stay.”
Seeing the full face of the man in the fedora felt surreal.
“He was 27, but he looked 57,” said Sumner.
She pieced together a timeline of her father’s hardscrabble life.
“He grew up in Merseyside (Liverpool), just down the road from John Lennon. At 22, he went to Australia, then to New Zealand, then to Canada. He must have had big dreams, but he had a problem with drink, and he was down on his luck.”
Taylor’s string of bad luck continued after his deportation — he remained estranged from his family and died in middle age after a life very different than that of the daughter he never knew.
His life was neither charmed nor blissful, but it was, in a way, remarkable.
“To have a photo of him, it’s an absolute treasure,” said Sumner.
She has something else, too: a story. What more could a former reference librarian ask for?
dryan@postmedia.com
From the archives: The Vancouver Sun and Province’s 1957 stories
Bank staff traps holdup suspect
Jan. 25, 1957 (Vancouver Sun)
Employees of a downtown Vancouver bank raided Thursday formed a cordon to wall off escape for a suspected bank robber.
Employees of the main branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, 685 West Hastings, hemmed in a man who is now held by police. … The Royal Bank suspect lounged against a counter, surrounded by bank employees, until police arrived to arrest him.
Bank employees made no attempt to grab him, and he made no attempt to escape.
Seaman Stanley Thomas Taylor, 27, of no fixed address, has been charged with robbery. Taylor appeared before Magistrate Oscar Orr this morning and asked that his case proceed.
Assistant city prosecutor paul Delaney said the accused had been tested on the drunkometer, which showed a reading of .157 — “slightly above the accepted level of intoxication.”
(A man is considered impaired when the drunkometer indicates .15.)
Accused ‘Wanted to Go to Jail’
March 8, 1957 (Vancouver Sun)
An accused bank robber testified at his trial Thursday that he gave a bank clerk a “stickup” note “because I wanted to go to jail until I could get work.”
Stanley Thomas Taylor, 27, no fixed address, pleaded not guilty to a charge of robbing Mrs. Kay Bruce, teller at the Royal Bank of Canada, 685 West Hastings, “by assaulting her with intent to steal.”
Taylor said he knew the police would come and that “I wanted to go back to jail until work came.”
He said he had been released from Oakalla two days earlier.
Prosecutor Alex Mackoff explained that the note Taylor gave Mrs. Bruce constituted the assault.
Magistrate Oscar Orr adjourned the case to Tuesday so he could consider the charge before handing down his decision.
“When I was let out (of Oakalla), the police took me to the city jail for a couple of days. I was finally released that morning (Jan. 23),” Taylor testified. “I went right to the beer parlor for a while and then to another where I wrote the holdup note. I was just fooling around.
“I can’t remember getting to the bank, but when I handed the girl (Mrs. Bruce) the note, I told her I didn’t want any money.”
Sailor jailed 3 years
(March 13, 1957, The Province)
A 27-year-old seaman was sentenced in police court Tuesday to three years for robbing the Royal Bank of Canada at Granville and Hastings. Stanley Thomas Taylor had said during the trial that he “didn’t want any money” when he held up teller Mrs. Kay Bruce.
“She passed me some money, I passed it back,” he said.
The holdup took place two days after Taylor had been released from jail.
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