“It all started with all the lies.."

"It all started with all the lies they said about him. He was this and that you know, a cruel old man and all that." (Aunt Mandy)

Who was the real Slumach? Was he indeed the "bloodthirsty old villain" of the newspaper reports? In her interviews, Aunt Mandy stressed that her parents (Peter and Katherine Pierre) said that Slumach was a kind old man, closer to eighty than to sixty and that he was a crippled and harmless old widower who lived in a shack at the bottom end of Pitt Lake, on the abandoned Silver Creek Indian Reserve.
Why did this kind, elderly man shoot Bee? Louis Bee was described as "in the habit of blustering at and threatening everyone with whom he came in contact. " Slumach also told Jason Allard "that the young man who he killed had tantalized him on every occasion." It was said, that there was "bad blood between Slumach and Bee." Bee’s words that day may have been the last straw, enough to enrage Slumach to the point that he shot and killed him with his old front loader.
Was Slumach a serial killer? There were rumours in the press at the time of his conviction that this was not the first time that Slumach had killed, but as Aunt Mandy said: "It all started with all the lies they said about him. He was this and that you know, a cruel old man and all that." Indian Agent McTiernan believed Slumach, who denied that he had killed anyone other than Louis Bee. The buzz may have related to a number of unsolved murders in the area for which Slumach ’s hanging was meant to be a deterrent, aside from as punishment of his own misfortune.
With the hanging of this old man, the press ’s interest in Slumach died. What else was there to report? Slumach only was rumoured to be involved with other murders, and at that time there was nothing about gold in his story. British Columbia, between the Fraser and Klondike gold rushes, was a world full of prospectors, fortune seekers and speculators, and even gossip about gold would have triggered a stampede to the Pitt Lake area. That would have been duly recorded by the press —but it did not happen.