On the morning of June 1, 2013, Venard Samson motored across the mouth of Petit-de-Grat Harbour in a small fishing boat. The narrow harbor, off the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia, is wedged between Petit-de-Grat Island, where he lives, and the wooded tail end of a larger island known as Isle Madame. By 6:30 a.m., he’d pulled one line of lobster traps and glided past a green navigational buoy. The North Atlantic, known for its rough winds and heavy swell, stretched out before him, so flat he could have passed a straight razor over its surface. “The water was right dead and calm,” he later recalled. “It was a nice damn day, clear, you could see anything.”
Then, he spotted the dark shape. It was floating along an uninhabited stretch of shoreline the fishermen all knew as Mackerel Cove. At first, Venard thought little of it; he had seen dead deer there before. But as Venard pulled closer, he discovered a banged-up fiberglass skiff, a small oceangoing vessel. It was waterlogged, its sideboards cracked and its bow barely a foot above the water line. No one was on board.
Venard circled the damaged boat three times, and discovered a floating gas tank and some green rope tangled around an anchor. The skiff’s outboard motor was missing, and its bowline, the rope that ties to the front of a boat, was apparently cut. Venard, a short man with a laborer’s physique who often speaks in an excitable squawk, picked up his radio and called the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax, some 120 miles to the southeast. No, his GPS plotter wasn’t working. He’d have to drop a lobster trap to mark the spot. Around 6:55 a.m., the marine VHF radio cackled with a universal distress call: Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. All mariners were requested to be on the lookout and report any sightings of a man overboard.
Venard towed the skiff back toward the wharf and handed it off to another lobsterman. In some 50 years of fishing, neither man had encountered a situation like this. But both immediately wondered what had happened to Philip “Bowser,” who often roared around in the beat-up skiff, which he christened the Midnight Slider. The missing man’s full name was Philip Joseph Boudreau, but no one called him that because another local fisherman had the same name. A bull-necked man, 43 and going soft around the waist, Philip didn’t have a license to go lobster fishing. Islanders caught glimpses of him and Brodie, his blonde Labrador, cruising around under the light of the moon.
Philip Boudreau
Courtesy of C.H. Boudreau
Later that morning, a ball cap washed ashore and a pair of boots were found floating in the harbor. It seemed Philip Boudreau was gone.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police got involved and determined there had been an “altercation.” Five days later, Mounties arrested the three-man crew of a boat called the Twin Maggies. One deckhand confessed to shooting at the skiff; another later claimed the crew intentionally drowned Philip and dumped his body overboard. Crown prosecutors moved swiftly to charge the three men for a crime the press dubbed “murder for lobster.” Stories described a tranquil fishing village, a place that had not had a murder in over 20 years, rocked by violence. The insular, tight-knit community was the kind of place where spats erupted over fishing territory, many of which inevitably arose each season over missing traps, and yet somehow, people had managed to settle their own disputes.
At first, the CBC portrayed Philip as a missing fisherman. Radio reports also claimed he had a lengthy criminal record. A swirl of rumors divided islanders: One camp claimed Philip was not a fisherman at all. He was nothing more than a notorious, lifelong bully and a petty thief (they pronounce it teef) who had a reputation for stealing lobster.
“Who cares if this man has a criminal history,” another woman wrote in the comments of a local news report. “He also has family. And people who care about him. There is a human being missing or possibly dead.” Even if Philip had been a vandal and a saboteur, he didn’t act alone: Fishermen allegedly paid him, in cash and marijuana, to steal lobster and destroy traps. “They had nothing; they steal to make a buck,” one islander told me. “Fishermen was using him to play tricks.” Not a single report was called in to police.
No two stories about the missing man were the same, but there was a disconcerting fact: To watch someone die a painful death in public without intervening is heartless, but to ignore anyone overboard, anywhere on the water, is also a violation of international law and custom. Upon receiving a distress signal, crews are obligated to “proceed with all speed to render assistance.” Yet, on June 1, 2013, the morning Philip went missing, few fishermen stopped to search for him. It’s believed his body drifted away.
The so-called murder for lobster was an anomaly, but its reverberations contained a familiar ring: This was what happened when the ties that bind any close-knit community together become a gag order. It’s a story about how things can unravel anywhere — not just on a remote island off another island off the coast of Canada. But the Acadians are survivors — as one islander put it to me, “suspicious and a little superstitious.” In the first hectic days after Philip went missing, some remembered thinking it was all a big joke. “I figured he’d be hidden in the woods and in a few months there’d be a reward out,” the owner of one island store told me. “I really thought he had jumped off and was swimming ashore.”
When I visited the island earlier this year, I saw how it wore down islanders when entitled outsiders wrote headlines making them out to be brazen, lawless rogues, who, as one commentator put it, were “a half-step removed from Deliverance.” My first day there, I met one man who wore blue coveralls and a trucker’s cap at a general store. He didn’t want his name used at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me. Of course not. He’d known me for the lesser part of an hour. The problem was that he knew everyone — he knew many families going back at least two generations — and everybody knew him. “I want to live with the people. I don’t want to get in shit with them,” he said. “We’re all so much related it’s not even funny.”
Steve Wadden for BuzzFeed News
Isle Madame (pronounced eel m’dam) lies off the southeastern coast of Cape Breton, an island tethered by a narrow, rocky causeway to Nova Scotia in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. The villages there remain Acadian strongholds, some 3,000 strong. Many families still speak a beautiful French dialect that dates to the 15th century, preserving a vestigial flicker of the early European presence in North America. An 1875 guidebook describes them as “pious Catholics and daring seamen,” who, for several centuries, lived on cod fishing. Near Petit-de-Grat Island, there’s a black granite monument in the middle of the cemetery that depicts a lone fisherman pulling up a single fish. It lists dozens of the men lost at sea. Philip Boudreau’s name isn’t there.
Philip was the youngest of the four Boudreau siblings. His grandfather had built a square saltbox house out on the windswept tip of Petit-de-Grat Island, and Philip’s father earned the family's "Bowser" nickname for his unrelenting wiliness. Philip’s big brother Gerard said, “Bowsers were always in mischief. They had nothing. They poach year-round to get what they want to live to eat, and we grew up still doing the same thing.”
The Bowser brothers definitely got into mischief: Gerard remembered one summer when they were kids when he’d shot Philip in the head. It was an accident. The two brothers were out hunting. Gerard, a jovial man who now weighs at least 300 pounds, admitted he wasn’t quite so big in the belly back then and the two of them crawled around a pond. “Hold it right there,” he told Philip, “I want to shoot that muskrat.” Gerard took a shot. It dinged a metal pipe and the bullet ricocheted straight into Philip’s temple; he then flipped into the pond. After that, their father destroyed his gun, but it was just harmless slapstick, just brothers being brothers, Gerard said. “That’s why we’re the Bowsers.”
Midnight Slider
CTV News / Via ctvnews.ca
His sister, Margaret Rose, called Philip — who never learned to read or write and eventually dropped out of school — the class clown. In the ensuing years, Philip was charged with at least 80 crimes, according to court records; islanders knew he spent many years in prison and, according to the rumor mill, once, or twice — no one could be sure — he’d escaped custody. Flaunting authorities must have resonated with some residents, who hid him, putting him up in old farmsteads or unused sheds. One time, a Mountie arrived, lights flashing, drew her gun, and assumed a shooting stance. A neighbor remembered Philip running off and up a hillside. “Stop in the name of the Queen,” she said. He turned, grabbed his crotch, and yelled back, “Tell the Queen to suck on this.”
To some, he was a kind of modern folk hero, perpetually on the run from the law. There were stories about an official who chased him straight off the end of the wharf into the frigid harbor. Philip hid under some seaweed and emerged, his middle finger held aloft. “Everybody laughing at him,” one islander told me. “When you’re watching it, it’s hilarious. That’s the thing.” A neighbor once saw Philip riding down the road on an ATV with so many marijuana plants, presumably stolen, it looked as if he were wearing a mask of leaves that revealed only his eyes. And in each one of these stories, his arrival was like a punch line. He would show up at a community dance in a village called Little Anse, islanders said, and someone would say, “Philip, you can’t be dancing alone.” “Are you fucking crazy?” he said. “I’m dancing with everybody.”
As his reputation grew, Philip caught the blame for more crimes than a single person seemed capable of committing. As Andre LeBlanc, a local resident, told me, “Every time he was released from prison, there’d be break-ins that week. Was it Philip or was it people taking advantage of when Philip was released?”
“Unfortunately, he also got the blame for what he didn’t do and kind of enjoyed the notoriety," he said. "The way his mind was.” Andre LeBlanc remembered often bumping into Philip around town and at the Corner Bridge, the local convenience store. “You staying out of trouble?” he’d ask. “Well, yeah,” Philip would reply, with a shrug, “I’m still poaching lobsters.”
Steve Wadden for BuzzFeed News
Around Isle Madame, lobster is a high-stakes game. Crews are up at 4 a.m. and haul as many as 250 traps before returning around midday to sell their catch. The lobster fishing area, formally known as LFA 29, is the smallest in Nova Scotia and makes up about $6 million of Canada’s $1.7 billion lobster industry. (All figures are in Canadian dollars.) Licenses once sold for 25 cents a piece, but now fetch as much as $780,000. Lobster catches climbed in the last decade as cod stocks, the island’s founding fishery, were decimated as a result of overfishing or, depending on who you talk to, the federally sanctioned exploitation. Crews work seven days a week during lobster season, which lasts from late April through late June.
Craig Landry
CTV News / Via ctvnews.ca
During the 2013 season, five boats set heavy wooden traps and buoys in Mackerel Cove — the place where Venard Samson found Philip Boudreau’s damaged skiff. Most mornings, the Twin Maggies, a large boat by island standards, motored around the cape. Dwayne Samson, 43, the captain, owned the boat with his wife, Carla, 37. The couple, who had twin daughters, were known as a sweet and hardworking. Carla inherited the lobster fishing license from her father, James Landry, and James worked as Dwayne’s deckhand along with one of James’ cousins, Craig Landry. Those two months probably represented the most substantial, if not the sole, portion of the family’s income. (The family declined to be interviewed for tfhis story.)
Lobster fishermen maintain informal boundary lines and some claim the Twin Maggies broke the custom that season. A lobsterman with bloodshot eyes and a leather jacket, who declined to give me his name and later threatened to shoot me if I did use it, said the Twin Maggies crew moved into Mackerel Cove after having depleted their own territory in another small harbor near Petit-de-Grat. Traditionally, the lobsterman told me, you’d set traps only in the little cove where you lived or risk losing your gear. “What you have is now is greed," he said. "It’s only because them guys are young. We were never getting into no racket. We play tricks.” Supposedly, Philip was playing these so-called tricks — poaching lobsters and sabotaging traps.
A group of locals at the Tea Room.
Steve Wadden for BuzzFeed News
On the afternoon of Philip’s disappearance, several eyewitnesses who were questioned by the Mounties implied the Twin Maggies crashed into Boudreau’s skiff in retaliation for stealing and sinking their lobster traps. Others claimed the Twin Maggies crew went out in deep waters that morning, deeper than anyone would be setting traps, with something dragging in its wake. A truck driver saw the crew pass around a rifle on the dock. Another lobster buyer claimed the Twin Maggies crew arrived an hour later than usual with scuff marks on her normally pristine bow, though lobster boats get banged up all the time hauling traps.
Late that evening, Twin Maggies deckhand Craig Landry arrived at a small police station on Isle Madame, where he confessed that the boat had, indeed, collided with Philip’s skiff.
It was earlier that week, Craig said, when there'd been dense fog, and Philip had emerged out of nowhere: “All of a sudden, bang!” The fast little skiff slammed into a lobster boat more than twice its size. “He was hollering, ‘I’m going to fucking burn your house if you don’t fuck off from here.’” Then, Craig said, Philip circled and slammed into the Twin Maggies again.
Steve Wadden for BuzzFeed News
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