Richard Bocklage was a former pharmacy student at the University of Missouri. He is wanted for a 1980 murder. His car was found in Thompson, Manitoba.

Richard Bocklage was a former pharmacy student at the University of Missouri, and is wanted for the murder of his ex-fiancé, Dr. Tatjana “Tanya” Kopric in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sept. 18, 1980.

Six days later, his car was found abandoned by RCMP here in Thompson, Manitoba, about 900 miles (1,448 kilometres) north of the crime scene. He was reportedly seen by two local residents.

I only know this because my friend Ken Bodnar sent me an email March 18, describing bit about the Bocklage story from almost 40 years ago, adding, “This got me to wondering if he disappeared into woods or city of Thompson, and has lived there all these years under an assumed name. (Authorities think that he may have made his way back to the States, but who knows?).

Ken lives in Nassau in the Bahamas for most of the year. He is a past contributor to Outdoor Canada Magazine where he was the author of “Tales from the Rusty Hook Club”, and numerous magazines and newspapers across Canada and the United States. His calendar “Fishing Dreams” sold coast to coast. He’s a pretty eclectic guy, a renaissance man of sorts, who is also fascinated with the intersection of blockchain, big data, analytics, machine learning, and the Internet of Things. Ken specializes in tokenization and data-centric enterprise blockchains.

Our fathers both worked at General Motors in Oshawa in the West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department.

Richard Gerard Bocklage, alias Dick Bocklege, alias Dick Boch, was ten years younger than Dr. Tatjana “Tanya” Kopric, 34, and had grown up in St. Louis. He studied pharmacy at the University of Missouri. She was from Yugoslavia and had immigrated to the United States in 1975. The two had started dating in March 1980, after a gynecologist, who worked with Tanya, who was a resident at Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City, introduced her to his cousin Richard; a few weeks later, he moved into her apartment. Six months later, they were engaged. However, her friends did not like him and felt that he was just using her for money.

Bocklage began spending more time with Kopric and less time in class. Midway through his sophomore year, he fell behind in his studies. At certain points, he became close to dropping out of school. On July 19, 1980, he was notified by administrators that he was academically ineligible. He demanded that Kopric use her connections in the admissions department to get himself re-enrolled. However, she refused to help him. Soon, he began to exhibit wild mood swings.

Three weeks later, on Sept. 2, Kopric broke off the engagement and kicked him out.

Two weeks later, Bocklage returned to class and acted as if nothing had changed. His professor contacted an administrator who spoke with Bocklage.

He argued with the administrator and then angrily left. He later wrote to the admissions office, begging the officials to re-consider his case. At 3 p.m. on September 18, the admissions committee met to determine his fate at the college. The committee agreed unanimously that Bocklage should not be re-admitted to the school.

Hoping to avoid a confrontation, the committee quickly dispersed. At 3:45 pm, two professors spotted Bocklage driving towards the dean’s office. They immediately headed in the opposite direction. He roamed the hallways, searching for the dean of admissions. He carried a manila envelope; some believe that it contained a handgun. Three hours later, Kopric returned to her apartment. As she exited her car, Bocklage appeared and shot her three times in the head with a .45 automatic pistol. A witness identified him as the shooter. Investigators learned that he had purchased the weapon just weeks prior to the murder.

Ken’s March 18 email included the YouTube link below to this Feb. 20, 1991 “Unsolved Mysteries,” Season 3 episode, where the first segment features the Bocklage-Kopric story. I always loved Robert Stack’s narration years ago and the associated format on “Unsolved Mysteries.” A real guilty pleasure, so to speak.

The FBI was at both of his parents’ funerals to see if he would show, but with no luck. Bocklage has a sister who still lives in St. Louis.

Whatever happened to Richard Bocklage? Why did he apparently drive from Kansas City, Missouri to Thompson, Manitoba almost 40 years ago now in late September 1980:

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Is coming home a geographical place or place of the heart? Perhaps it is some of both

 

 

What does “coming home” mean?

A friend of mine from Minnesota, long a union mover-and-shaker in Washington, D.C., recently wrote that “You Can’t Go Home Again, written by Thomas Wolfe, made it clear what this tension is that I feel. After 21 years gone from Minnesota I feel an existential angst when ‘coming home.’

“It took me many years to accept that it wasn’t home anymore – Maryland is. I tend to be overly sensitive to things. Moving away was the hardest thing I have ever done (not involving losing people to death and a couple … of other ways.) It has become almost a tortuous trip full of ‘dead memories,’ things that were real, or did I see them in a movie – and why was I in that movie too?

“I’ve come to understand places as having their own weight or wavelength. When I found out a few years back that gravity actually fluctuates around the globe, it made sense to me. I’m rambling I know – but have others felt this way too? Do you have a hard time returning to a place? In the end I know moves can be very important and you can grow from them. I also think Americans move too much and also lose a lot in the process. In the end I can’t square it exactly, but I too have learned you can never really go home again.”

Thought provoking questions, all, to be sure. Where and what indeed is “home”?

I grew up in Southern Ontario in Oshawa, just east of Toronto. Within five months of my going off to university in 1976, my dad had retired from General Motors and my parents retired away from there. Suddenly a place I had taken for granted as home wasn’t so much anymore, and never has been since. I unexpectedly but quickly lost most of my sense of connection to Oshawa. Some 40 years on I’ve seldom been back. Since leaving Oshawa, I’ve lived and worked across much of Canada – from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories – as well as spending time living in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and North Carolina. For the last nine years, I’ve lived in Thompson in Northern Manitoba. Yet on some level – time and tribe perhaps – Oshawa and Ontario will always be home. I can close my eyes but for just a minute and it is 1974 again, and I know exactly where I am and who I am with, and they know me in ways others never will, as the music on the AM radio band provides the soundtrack for our lives. As do train whistles.

I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. Like being a teenager in Oshawa in the 1970s, again, all I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in that very same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

You Can’t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, a novice author, who writes a book that makes frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill, a fictional small town set in the South, to find it is no longer the peaceful place of his youth. The town is caught up in frenzied real estate speculation that precedes the stock market crash of 1929. The book is a national success but the residents of the town, unhappy with what they view as Webber’s distorted depiction of them, send the author menacing letters and death threats.

Wolfe took the title, You Can’t Go Home,  from a conversation with Australian-born journalist Ella Winter, who had remarked to him: “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

The title acts as counterpoint to nostalgia, which is so often weighted with both inaccurately positive bias and an inability to appreciate the changes wrought by time on places and people we remember as static and permanent. In general terms, it means that attempts to relive youthful memories are never as fulfilling as during their initial creation. Webber realizes: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Up here in Thompson, we tell people home is where the heart is. Raymonde, the head cashier at Giant Tiger here, has built a new home with her husband to retire to in a couple of years back in Campbellton, New Brunswick, on the south bank of the Restigouche River opposite Pointe-à-la-Croix, Quebec.  Another friend and colleague from University College of the North here, who arrived in Thompson in July 2007, the same month and year I arrived, is soon decamping to return home to the Membertou First Nation, just outside Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island.

Others, perhaps surprisingly stay on here long after retirement. A friend from Grand Falls-Windsor, a town located in the centre of Newfoundland and Labrador, has told me many times he and his wife go back for visits every few years but have no interest in moving back to the Rock with their children and grandchildren in this area, where they were born and raised. Maybe Brandon, he says, thinking about moving some day maybe, because the winter is milder, if not less stormy in Southern Manitoba.  It’s a not unfamiliar story. Another friend saw her parents move this past winter, after five years of retirement back home in St. John’s, to Sanford in the Rural Municipality of Macdonald, just a few kilometres southwest of Winnipeg in south central Manitoba. Grandchildren and children – family – trumping other considerations over the longer run.

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