Murder? The last thing on the minds of Fred Clayson, Lynn Relfe, and Lawrence Olson as they spent Christmas morning walking down the bank of the Yukon. A couple of hours later and a few kilometers away, their nude corpses floated under the Yukon ice.
Information included came from Michael Gates’ book
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The three had left the little roadhouse at Minto in the morning, headed south to a small RCMP post to share Christmas dinner with their friend, Corporal Ryan. As they walked, two men, hiding in the brush along their path, shot all three. O’brien and Graves then stepped out to finish the job, put a bullet in each victim’s head and collected any items of value the men had carried with them. Chopping a hole in the Yukon ice, they stripped the three and pushed them through the hole into the water.
Clothing and items they didn’t want, they scattered to be covered by Yukon snow. And then O’brien shot his partner Graves, put his corpse in the river with the others and headed off along the river toward Tagish.
Authorities in Tagish knew nothing of the murders, of course, but apparently they did know that O’brien had been raiding miner’s caches. They arrested him and locked him up.
The story of the murders came together very slowly. Three men had disappeared. Telegrams, exchanging ideas and suspicions flew between RCMP posts. And Fred Clayson’s brother hired an American private detective, Phillip McGuire. Who came to the Yukon and teamed up with an English Mountie named Alexander Pennycrick.
Explore North’s Take on Mounties in early Yukon
Knowing the area the missing men had walked through they searched it until they found the remains of O’brien’s last camp. They also sifted the snow and found pools of frozen blood, a key that turned out to open a safe in the Clayton’s business in Skagway, a receipt with Lawrence Olson’s name on it… And they found shell casings of the same calibre as O’brien’s rifle.
When the Yukon melted and yielded up the victim’s bodies in June, the investigators had turned up enough evidence to charge O’brien with murder. At his trial in Dawson City the Crown got him convicted and on the morning of August 23, 1901 his neck snapped at the end of a rope.
