Forget Robert "Willie" Pickton, considered to be Canada's most prolific serial killer.
He simply doesn't deserve that title.
I mean , by his own admission, he only killed 49 people - almost invisible people - prostitutes,many of aboriginal descent, who almost no one cared about when they went "missing".
('Missing': aka killed, ground up and used to feed pigs that were later sold as pork, Sweeney Todd fashion...)
No, Canada's and North America's most prolific serial killer was an intimidating mountain of a woman called Lila Coolen.
The infamy of her crimes should rival those of Lise Koch, the real life Shewolf of the SS , but they don't.
In fact ,among many older Nova Scotians,( but never of course on the record), she remains almost a saint, a martyr to the medical establishment.
They continue to feel that she did a lot of good, saved a lot of families and young women a lot of shame, rid the world of a lot of useless trash.
It is unknown how many hundreds of people she had killed --- because these people were well and truly invisible - the invisible of the invisible --- lacking even birth certificates.
Now Coolen is a very rare name in North American overall --- the USA has 1000 times more people than the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, but there are more Coolens in Halifax than in all of America.
Rare to the point of invisiblity in America, Coolen by contrast is a very old and very common name along the South Shore region ofNova Scotia.
To locals - and until the retirement boom, almost everybody there was a 'local' , she 'was one of us' , not a 'CFA' (Come from Away) ,like her Oregon-born husband William Young.
William was merely an appendage to his domineering wive, whose secret to staying out of prison all her long life was precisely that she operated her own personal vertically-integrated Auschwitz in her hometown area of Fox Point-East Chester along that South Shore region.
The South Shore was never a home to immigrants of any sort ; a place where almost all the local families had intermarried with each other, where everybody was relatives to almost everyone and all knew each other's darkest family secrets.
As a result it was a land of mutual, genteel, blackmail ensuring that everyone's family secrets remains forever secret.
The highly rational and modernist Willie Picton made sure to profit even from 'the squeal of the pig' of his crimes, by turning his victims into pig swill after he had sexually tortured and killed them.
Just as the modernist and rationalist Nazis first worked their victims to the skin and bone on a starvation diet,then
took all their property and valuables , next removing their hair and gold teeth and then using what little fat that was left in their bodies as fuel for their crematoriums.
Lila Coolen didn't miss a trick either.
Auschwitz is famous for neither being a killing camp or a work camp but rather being both - a fully vertically integrated modernist factory.
Lila Coolen aimed to be equally efficient in extracting money from the weak and suffering.
North American families were loath (are loath ?) to see their children raised by people of another faith: which meant that Jewish families, no matter how wealthy ,could rarely hope to get a child by legal adoption.
Well-mannered North American families also would do almost anything rather than admit one of their own had had a child out of wedlock.
Lila Coolen made money on both (all) sides of these social 'problems'.
She made women (and their families) pay a small fortune to have their out of marriage babies in the privacy of her East Chester Maturnity Home.
If the mother was too poor to pay much, she could slave away at the home as almost unpaid staff, till the debt was paid off.
If possible, Lila Coolen would try to have the mother give up the baby - she would then charge the mother money for looking after it for life.
In fact most of the babies, the lucky babies, were auctioned off, mostly to wealthy American Jewish families willing to risk an illegal adoption.
World War Two for Lila Coolen forever remained the happy memory of the fat years : at $6,000 a baby she was raking it in .
Remember, FDR started the process to build the
Atomic Bomb with a $6000 grant ---- that was big money back then.
To get equivalent buying power, 1940 income versus 2012 income, you might trying multiplying that by 30 to 1.
Between 1937 and 1947 ,Lila Coolen banked a cool $3.5 million on the sale of babies alone ---- don't forget she was also raking it from the unfortunate mothers as well.
But those profits were never enough - they never are for your modern modernist are they ?
More profits could be squeezed out of the living ---' there was no pressing need for real medical staff was there? ' , said this Seven Day Adventist missionary.
The rural poor in her community lapped up her digs at the expensive, uppity, urban-educated medical establishment.
Cleaners were rare on site too, --- but the nurseries weren't filthpits said Ms Coolen, 'we're just county basic, not big city fancy' .
But what to do with those babies born 'defective' and 'deficient' as we were wont to say in those happy pre-PC days?
And what about those darkish babies, born out of mixed race breeding?
Well a lot of North Americans thought both should be gassed to death by the State.
But they said so quietly, because most people won't quite go that far in their eugenic fervor.
How far they did go was far enough, in any case.
Lots of people thought that neither defective babies or babies of mixed race ( who they thought had the worse genes from both parents) had long to live anyway - an early death was inevitable.
So, the feeling was that if a defective or mixed breed baby was already dangling at the end of a long rope, what harm could it possibly be if some kindly medical
personnel tugged gently at their tiny ankles to ease them into the next world?
Our Seventh Day Adventist missionary Lila Coolen certainly agreed.
It is rumoured she might have killed a few of the spoiled merchandise outright - by placing a pillow over their tiny heads.
Yes, Lila Coolen did have a wicked temper and she might have occasionally have been merely trying to quiet a squalling/ hungry/ cold /dying/ baby by soothing them with the closest available pillow.
But that was too brutal and too obvious a process to employ en masse --- suffocated people - even babies - tend to show the means of their death upon their faces.
Better to merely 'freshen' the defectives, by putting them in unheated rooms with inadequate clothing and bedding and then feed them only on molasses water.
They'd usually be dead in a week or two - quick enough.
Then, quick as a bunny, into a nice butter box they went
for the brief but decent burial in a big field, right next to the Seventh Day Adventist cemetery in Lila Coolen's hometown of Fox Point a dozen miles away.
If she could the canny Lila, never one to miss a trick, also asked the greiving for money for attending the burial !
Why did Lila never go to jail - and why was she able to end her days gainfully employed by the government teaching the children of Fox Point her twisted,wicked, values ?
There are many, many reasons: none of them flattering to the ordinary, decent, Nova Scotians of her generation.
Most people wanted to know as little as possible about out-of- wedlock pregnancies and illegal adoptions --- her Home solved a messy social problem without forcing people to confront the real issues -- and importantly it kept mom and child off the taxpayer-funded welfare rolls.
Lila did society's dirty work and society was truly grateful.
Sometimes she literally did SOCIETY's dirty work: as in High Society.
A publisher who gets an employee pregnant and then watches as Lila makes the problem 'go away' isn't likely to turn his investigative hounds on Lila is he?
Ditto for politicians or bureaucrats or church fathers.
Like J Edgar Hoover, Lila collected a lot of secrets for both protection and profit.
She also played up her local South Shore working class roots against them there rich smart ass big city doctors.
Her Seventh Day Adventists community also held similar views about the medical community.
Above all, she relied on the quiet support for 'popular eugenics' that existed among almost all of the Protestant population of the world from the 1890s to the 1960s.
Rumours swirled that she was 'quickening' the useless babies by underheating their nursery and underfeeding
them, but this was a traditional practise of baby mills that far predated the rise of formal Eugenics.
Sure, she might be hastening the inevitable deaths of useless babies but so what (insert a Hegelian Shrug here), wasn't their early deaths were going to occur anyway?
So now, when we turn to another part of the Protestant world of the early 1940s and to Nazi doctor Valentin Falthauser, we must ask ourselves, was he in any different from Lila Coolen ?
Similarity number one: like her, he never had to pay for his mass murders.
Similarity number two: he, too, knew how to disguise murder in common local customs : this was a folksy/volksy, downhome, Heimat, sort of murder.
Just as Lila Coolen used the traditional food of rural Nova Scotians, molasses, in her death potions, so too did Dr Valentin advocate the very traditional German peasant foods of potatoes,turnips and cabbage for his 'sure death meals'.
His charges, those institionalized inmates too weak to do enough work to deserve a slightly larger ration (so that they still starved to death but not before putting out some useful work), got only these three vegtables in a watery soup, meal after meal, day after day - until death.
Without protein or fats and without enough trace minerals and vitamins this unrelentling diet usually ensured a death by disease in a few months.
Let the staff gossip to the world outside the Homes - how could Germany's favourite vegetables cause deliberate death ?
The German Aktion T4 program of 1939-1940 was far too industrial for Valentin : all those fatal needles and gassing and the foul-smelling sweet human smoke pouring out of the chimmeys.
Locals complained and gossiped ,until all Germany and all the world knew about it.
It had to be officially stopped but was encouraged to carry on in a decentralized, unofficial basis.
This process which went on even after the Allies ruled Germany, killed far more than the Aktion T4 effort.
Much attention - far too much attention - has focussed on the direct killing aspects of this process.
In a sort of 'Porn of the Holocaust', we learn much about the overdosing of patients with sleeping pills followed up by a big needle-full of morphine if needed.
These deaths were horrible but relatively quick --- much worse were the long slow very painful deaths by starvation on The Falthauser Diet, for two reasons.
I suspect this was the cause of the largest numbers of deaths- and numbers do matter in murder.
More importantly, unlike the relatively uncommon 'death by needle' practiced secretly by some doctors and some
nurses in every county in every time period, inmate death by slow starvation was common throughout all the world in times of war and want, as a more or less deliberate public policy.
The most common way was to issue piously inmates the same inadequate ration that all others in the nation got -- but unlike most other people, the inmates couldn't garden, buy or barter to get the extra calories between inadequate ration and death.
We must never forget that government leaders' deliberate decisions about food distribution (ie food triage) which lead to slow death by starvation for millions was what links war heroes Churchill & Stalin to the war villains Hitler and Tojo (and VALENTIN and LILA) and it is something we all need to talk about.....
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